On August 1, 2007, when a section of an eight-lane bridge on Interstate 35W in downtown Minneapolis plummeted into the Mississippi River, killing more than a dozen people, Visiting Associate Professor Zhigang Shen—like many hearing the news—was appalled: he had been driving on the bridge himself just one week earlier. Unlike most people, however, Shen was in a position to actually address a significant part of the problems that had led to the horrifying collapse: how to improve the tracking and management of bridge health condition data.
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