Ireland’s annual civil engineering conference CERAI 2018 wrapped up Thursday, August 30th, with a special honor for the Urban Modeling Group’s Siyuan Chen. Chen’s paper, Bridge Deck Extraction and Investigation through a UAV Derived Point Cloud, was selected for a best paper award. Chen is a PhD student working with the TRUSS program at University College Dublin and supervised by Prof. Debra Laefer (NYU). Through his excellent work in UAV based infrastructure inspection, Chen has made important strides in improving inspection safety, efficiency, and cost efficacy by leveraging UAV data collection and subsequent 3D data analysis techniques.