ODU HOSTS AN INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE

Old Dominion hosted the fourth annual Next Generation Infrastructures conference, attracting 200 leading researchers from around the world in the field of infrastructure.  The purpose of this conference was to explore the design, analysis, operation and evolution of critical infrastructure globally, now and in the future.

"The study of infrastructure has reached a critical juncture from a multidimensional viewpoint - economic, engineering, social, environmental and international dimensions," said Adrian Gheorghe, Batten Chair of Systems Engineering.

Gheorghe said the idea for a conference pulling together the world's leading minds in future infrastructure study came from the Next Generation Infrastructure Foundation, which is based in the Netherlands. After the foundation hosted the inaugural conference in Rotterdam, subsequent events have been held in India and China the past two years.

The future of critical infrastructure in the United States is especially important now because so many issues are combining to create challenges for these complex, interconnected networks, Gheorghe said. "We have to look at these things from all dimensions: aging, which results in technical issues, and natural hazards, like Hurricane Katrina. Or it could be malicious attack, or a different type of terrorism. It could be cyber-attack. It is very fashionable now to consider a cyber-attack on our infrastructure."

Areas highlighted at the conference included security, protection and assessment of critical infrastructures, new methods for design and operation, modeling and simulation in critical infrastructure advances, and the role of governance and management issues in critical infrastructure.