I am a PhD student in the Department of Civil & Architectural Engineering at University of Miami. I’m being supervised by Dr. Minghui Cheng to develop digital twins for infrastructure systems.

Before I joined U, I obtained my BEng and MEng degrees at Hunan University. I am fortunate to be advised by Prof. Chao Zhang to integrate multi-source information for intelligent detection of ground properties during earth pressure balance shields (EPBS) tunnelling process.

Feel free to discuss research with me via ziheng.geng@miami.edu/gengziheng@hnu.edu.cn.

Recent News

• Student Poster Competition Winner [03/2025]: I have received 1st place in the Student Poster Competition at 1st Symposium on Climate-Smart Infrastructure Innovations & Implementation (CSi3) for the poster “An entropy-based formulation of Bayesian networks for large-scale system digital twins”.

• Paper [02/2025]: A paper entitled “Integrating multi-source data for life-cycle risk assessment of bridge networks: a system digital twin framework” is published in Journal of Infrastructure Preservation and Resilience.

• Excellent Abstract Award [11/2024]: We have won the Excellent Abstract Award at The 2nd Workshop on Future of Machine Learning in Geotechnics & the 5th Machine Learning in Geotechnics Dialogue for the paper “Integrating multi-source information for intelligent detection of ground properties during earth pressure balanced shield tunnelling”.

• PhD Study [08/2024]: Glad to announce that I have joined as a PhD student at the University of Miami under the supervision of Dr. Minghui Cheng! Look forward to working closely with Dr. Cheng.

• Paper [07/2024]: A paper collaborated with Yangkai entitled “Development and evaluation of a process-oriented 3D finite element model for earth pressure balance shield tunneling” is published in Computers and Geotechnics.

• Paper [07/2024]: A paper collaborated with Jiaxing entitled “Seismic analysis of segmental tunnels using multi-contact joint-based tunnel model” is published in Journal of Earthquake and Tsunami.

• Master Graduation [06/2024]: Thrilled to share that I have graduated from Hunan University and obtained my MEng degree in Engineering. Thanks to Prof. Chao Zhang for his unconditional guidance and support!

• Machine Learning Competition [10/2023]: I participated in The 2nd TBM Tunneling Parameters Data Sharing and Machine Learning Competition on behalf of the team “UNSAT” from Hunan University.

• Activity [07/2023]: I attended the joint summer camp hosted by Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou). Happy to meet with professors in Intelligent Transportation Thrust!

• Paper [05/2023]: Our paper entitled “A Kriging-random forest hybrid model for real-time ground property prediction during earth pressure balance shield tunneling” can be found on arXiv.

• Conference [03/2023]: I attended The National Highway Tunnel Academic Annual Conference in Wuxi, China. Great to see impressive engineering projects in China!