Dionysius Siringoringo

This month I had a chance to attend the 11th East-Asia Pacific Conference on Structural Engineering  (EASEC) in Taipei, Taiwan. It was a good conference, with many subjects and some of them are becoming very popular in civil engineering. The main topic of conference in structural engineering. This year special theme is about sustainability in civil engineering. The host of the conference is National University of Taiwan, which have done a tremendous work to put out such a good organization and arrangement.

with former advisor Prof. Iswandi Imran of ITB

This year conference is special because it was chaired by my prof, Prof. Fujino, so that many participants are from our research group. As always, conference is a good opportunity to learn what people have been doing and also to develop a network. I met a lot of old colleagues from previous EASEC conference (Bali 2003), and several alumni as well as my former lectures from ITB. I wrote two papers in this conference, one is a keynote as the second author co-written with Prof. Fujino and the other as the first author.

presenting a paper

Taipei itself is a nice city, a little similar with Jakarta but more humane. Transportation is not as good as it is in Tokyo, but they are cheap and readily available. Taxi fares in particular are very reasonable, while subway network is not as dense as it is in Tokyo, so we need to walk  a lot to reach our destination when using subway.

Me with Taipei 101 on the background

The most obvious place in Taipei is Taipei 101 tower. It is the tallest existing building in the world, soon to be replaced by Burj Dubai. I had a chance to visit the building by taking the world’s fastest elevator.  The building is equipped with TMD to prevent lateral vibration. In fact the elevator itself is equipped with control system.