Karen Weiss

SPEAKERS & SESSIONS

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FACILITATOR

Karen Weiss, Senior Industry Strategy Manager for Civil Infrastructure Owners, Autodesk

Karen Weiss became the Senior Industry Strategy Manager for Civil Infrastructure Owners at Autodesk in October 2015.  In her role, she provides industry leadership by developing and evangelizing the vision and plans for BIM with a focus on the value BIM provides to civil infrastructure owners. Ms. Weiss has a focus on strategies that help government agencies use data and technology to improve the way they plan, design, build and manage infrastructure assets.

Prior to taking on this new role, Weiss led the Infrastructure Industry Marketing team at Autodesk where she was responsible for providing marketing leadership and go-to-market realization planning and execution for civil infrastructure solutions worldwide.

Before joining Autodesk in 2008, Ms. Weiss spent 17 years with the Wisconsin Department of Transportation, where she worked on design and construction projects and was also involved in the development and implementation of new methods that used technology to streamline engineering processes in highway design and construction.  Ms. Weiss later spent time in the private sector, managing design and planning projects for a private consulting firm in Wisconsin.

Karen has a B.S. in Civil and Environmental Engineering from the University of Wisconsin and is a registered Professional Engineer in the State of Wisconsin.

PANELISTS

 John Williams, CEO, Impact Infrastructure

John has over 37 years of experience as an advisor to infrastructure and building development programs, 16 years as a principal owner of an international architecture and engineering company, and 13 years as an adjunct faculty member at Columbia University.  For the past 6 years he has been CEO of Impact Infrastructure, Inc., a Software as a Service company focused on bringing credible, objective, and affordable economic assessments to infrastructure and building investments.

He developed a series of awarding winning business practices including a framework for determining the value of GREEN.  He is a Member of CERES Presidents Council, is Chair-Elect for the Institute for Sustainable Infrastructure, is a Subject Matter Expert for Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB), served as Co-Chair of the West Coast Infrastructure Exchange Business Standards Committee, is a Member of the Partnership for New York City, and serves as a Trustee for the New York Foundation for the Arts.

In context of Smart Infrastructure, years ago, John realized that asset owners understand the importance of economic assessments but struggled with the cost involved with determining value of public benefit associated with investments in infrastructure and buildings.  Determined to democratize economic assessments, Impact Infrastructure has worked with software giant Autodesk to develop automated Triple Bottom Line – Based Cost Benefit Analysis (TBL-CBA) tools under the brand, Autocase www.autocase.com.  The analytical foundation for Autocase have been applied on behalf of more than $50B in a wide range of building and infrastructure projects.  Autodesk Infraworks licensees can access Autocase for Sites free of charge.

Michael Bomar, NYC Office lead Tetra Tech

Floren Poliseo, Director of Watershed Planning and Modeling, NYCDEP (Dept of Environmental Protection)

PANEL

Driving Force Behind Smart Infrastructure
Smart Mobility and Smart Buildings

Technology provides us a means to leverage data and to create, explore and evaluate design concepts in a real-world, 3D contextual environment. A ‘smart’ city is one that uses that data to make work easier, life better, access faster and fosters community engagement.  With Smart City Solutions and Services anticipated to create business opportunities forecasted to grow from $36.8 billion in 2016 to $88.7 billion in 2025, enabling decision makers to view, understand, question, interpret, and visualize information and analysis results in ways that reveal relationships, patterns and trends will be critical. Nowhere is this more pertinent than in the planning and designing of smart buildings and smart mobility.

With BIM’s capability to compute, contextualize, visualize and analyze enormous amounts of data, supporting the approach of “best possible” vs“ best practical” helps make all the existing and future infrastructure more responsive, resilient and affordable.