MECHANICAL ENGINEERING—ENGINEERING MECHANICS
Proudly Presents:
Dr. Pablo Tarazaga
Assistant Professor — Virginia Tech
Pablo A. Tarazaga currently holds the position of Assistant Professor at Virginia Tech in the Mechanical Engineering Department. He earned his masters and doctorate in mechanical engineering in 2004 and 2009 at Virginia
Tech. He later worked at the University of Bristol, UK as a Postdoctoral researcher in the University Technology
Center for Augusta Westland before returning to Virginia Tech. He founded and directs the Virginia Tech Smart
Infrastructure Laboratory (VTSIL) and the Vibrations, Adaptive Structures and Testing (VAST) Laboratory. His
main area of research focuses very broadly in the areas of structural vibration, testing, instrumentation and smart
material applications. Current projects include wave propagation in solids without reflection, shape-changing munitions, modal analysis, model reduction, large scale building instrumentation, human tracking and classification
using under floor sensors, design and implementation of non-linear artificial hair cells in hearing, structural health
monitoring and stress state identification of railroad. Among his awards, he held the American Society of Mechanical Engineers’ (ASME)
Parsons Scholarship, the NASA GSRP Fellowship, and the Virginia Space Grant Consortium Aerospace Graduate Research Award. He was
awarded the 2014 Dean's award for Outstanding New Assistant Professor at Virginia Tech and recently received the 2015 Air Force Office
of Scientific Research Young Investigator Award. He is grateful for the support of several federal and private groups such as AFOSR, ARMY, NASA, Alpha Foundation, Association of American Railroads, ARMY ERDC, NIST, etc.
Thursday,February11,2016
4:00 pm — 103 EERC
A unique and multidisciplinary building instrumentation
project with non-conventional applications
As we push the boundaries of our engineering systems we are demanding more and more of our scientific and engineering capabilities. In order to meet demands such as increased energy efficiency, and increased performance we find ourselves needing to develop systems that are highly accurate, that have new adaptable capabilities and are very well informed
of themselves and their surroundings. This challenges our conventional approach to problem solving, which is producing
a very exciting and creative time for our field. To this end, the Virginia Tech Smart Infrastructure Laboratory leverages the
most instrumented public building in the world for vibrations to carry out cutting edge research by challenging our conventional thinking of buildings and their human interaction. With this in mind, I will discuss the main points of the instrumentation endeavor of the Goodwin Hall building. A multi-year endeavor, created to develop a multidisciplinary test
bed for a myriad of topics, such as: human localization, tracking and classification, structural modeling and validation, security and threat detection and energy efficient building systems. We will delve into a few of these topics in more detail, in
particular the problem of human tracking and classification (i.e., gender) and gunshot detection and classification.