Dr. Mani Golparvar is the CSO and co-founder of Reconstruct. Dr. Mani Golparvar is also Professor of Civil Engineering, Computer Science, and Technology Entrepreneurship at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where he is the leading founder for the first nationwide center on AI for the built environment, engaging four universities, and more than 85 AEC/O, ConTech, and investment firms.
Dr. Golparvar has more than 25 years of professional experience in academia, the construction industry, and the technology/product development world. He has taught numerous graduate and undergraduate courses in construction engineering and management, computer vision, and BIM, and he was repeatedly selected in the “List of Teachers Ranked as Excellent by their Students” at the University of Illinois. He has also served as PI and Co-PI on numerous research projects that were funded by the National Science Foundation, Illinois Department of Transportation, and National Center for Supercomputing Applications, among many others in the United States. The outcome of his research projects was published in more than 200 articles including many published in leading computer vision venues such as CVPR and ICCV. With more than 17 patents, Dr. Golparvar’s work has translated into solutions and products in technology work including PARWORKS and RECONSTRUCT that have attracted more than $31M of venture capital funding and these technologies are used across the world.
His work in the area of computer vision, machine learning, and BIM has been the recipient of many awards including 2018 Walter Huber Research Prize from American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), 2017 National Top 20 Under 40 from ENR; 2016 Dan Halpin Award for Scholarship in Construction and 2013 James Croes Medal for innovation in Civil Engineering from ASCE; 2013 and 2010 CETI awards from FIATECH; and over 10 best journal and conference paper awards from ASCE and Wiley.
Dr. Golparvar has served as the Chair of the ASCE Construction Research Council, which is widely recognized as the premier national forum for construction engineering and management research and it includes in its membership more than 200 professors and scholars. Dr. Golparvar has also offered a testimony to the United States’ congress on the role of robotics for managing construction and operation of the infrastructure assets and has been keynote speaker in many major academic and industry conferences He is currently on the editorial board of many prestigious journals including ASCE Journal of Construction Engineering and Management, ASCE Journal of Computing in Civil Engineering, as well as ASCE Open Multidisciplinary Journal of Civil Engineering.