Gul Agha shares research on wireless sensors used to monitor bridges and civil infrastructure

Illinois Innovators

Gul Agha, professor of computer science and Director of the Open Systems Laboratory at the University of Illinois, joins the program. His widely cited work, "Actors: A Model of Concurrent Computing in Distributed Systems," provided a basis for a number of research projects in concurrent programming. Actor frameworks have been used to program Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook Chat, the British National Health Service Portal, and hundreds of commercial cloud applications. Together with Professor Bill Spencer, he co-directs the Illinois Structural Health Monitoring Group. The project pioneered research applying wireless sensor networks and distributed computing to continuously monitor the structural health of civil infrastructure such as bridges.