Ranjith Soman is an assistant professor of Digital Construction and specializes in digital engineering, systems engineering, and project management, enabling him to effectively drive digital transformation initiatives in construction. Dr. Soman has experience working with senior management, engineers, project managers, and academics, leveraging his knowledge in machine learning, semantic web technology, data visualization, mixed reality, and the Internet of Things to develop innovative digital strategies. He is passionate about seeking new ways to improve infrastructure projects and helping organizations stay ahead of the curve in today's rapidly evolving digital landscape.

Trained as a civil engineer, he received his master's through 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 from a large amount of heterogeneous disconnected datasets.

Ranjith 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 institute to implement and disseminate his research output to the industry through an InnovateUK funded project. Further, he spent 18 months as a post-doctoral researcher at ETH Zurich’s Future Cities Laboratory on Circular Future Cities project aimed at developing digital systems to enable circular economy at a city level.

research interest

• Digital Twins and artificial intelligence for infrastructure
• Computationally augmented decision making for project management
• Extended reality in the construction sector