Ranjith Kuttantharappel Soman

Trained as a civil engineer, he received his Master’s by research in Building Technology and Construction Management from the Indian Institute of Technology Madras. After his Master’s, he worked as a project assistant in the Building Automation Lab at IIT Madras to coordinate the development of a robotic system for self-assembly of columns and beams. He then moved to the Centre for Systems Engineering and Innovation at Imperial College London, where he did a PhD which focused on knowledge codification, semantic-web technologies, and reinforcement learning to improve construction productivity in an infrastructure context.

During his PhD, he developed a novel Linked-data based Constraint-Checking (LDCC) to identify possible blockers for smooth construction execution by deriving insights and from a large amount of heterogeneous disconnected datasets. He also spent an exchange semester at the Alan Turing Institute to combine LDCC with reinforcement learning to predict and generate conflict-free construction plans for infrastructure projects. After his PhD, he spent a year as a post-doctoral researcher at the same centre to implement and disseminate his research output to the industry through an InnovateUK funded project.