Dr. Chuanchuan Hou is an Associate Professor at the School of Transportation Science and Engineering, Beihang University. His research focuses on the life-cycle mechanical performance of concrete-filled steel tubular (CFST) structures, intelligent structural inspection, automated damage identification, and structural condition assessment. His work on intelligent inspection involves the development of UAV- and wall-climbing-robot-based systems for automated structural surface inspection, with particular interests in digital-twin-assisted mission planning, obstacle-aware autonomous inspection, and visual data acquisition in complex environments. His UAV inspection research integrates geometric digital twins, automated waypoint generation, voxelized obstacle information, and path-planning algorithms to improve the safety, coverage, and efficiency of structural inspection. He has also developed inspection equipment for challenging engineering environments, including UAV systems for upward-looking bridge inspection under weak GPS conditions and lightweight magnetic wall-climbing robots for visual inspection of steel structures.

His research further explores computer vision, deep learning, and semi-supervised learning for automated identification and quantitative assessment of structural defects. Representative work includes rotated-bounding-box-based methods for detecting arbitrarily oriented concrete cracks and characterizing their distribution patterns, as well as semi-supervised semantic segmentation methods for identifying corrosion states and structural members with reduced requirements for manually labelled data. His research on corrosion inspection further combines damage detection with structural-member identification to enable quantitative assessment of corrosion conditions and has been implemented in a smartphone-based mobile inspection platform. In structural condition assessment, he integrates experimental testing, vibration-based identification, probabilistic methods, and numerical modelling to evaluate structural degradation and post-damage performance. His recent work employs vibration testing and Bayesian model updating to identify spatial stiffness degradation in impact-damaged CFST members and to develop practical methods for rapid post-impact structural assessment.

He has served as Principal Investigator for four projects funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC), including projects under the General Program, Young Scientists Fund, and International Cooperation and Exchange Program, as well as a subproject under the National Key Research and Development Program of China during the 14th Five-Year Plan period. He has also participated in an NSFC Key Program. He has published more than 40 papers in SCI-indexed journals. As one of the principal drafters, he contributed to the English edition of the Chinese national standard GB/T 51446-2021. His research outcomes have been incorporated into Chinese national standards, ISO International Standards, and CIDECT international design guides.

Dr. Hou serves as Committee Manager of ISO/TC 71/SC 9, Steel-Concrete Composite and Hybrid Structures, and Convenor of ISO/TC 71/SC 9/WG 1. As one of the principal drafters (ranked second), he contributed to the development of ISO 16521:2024, Design of concrete-filled steel tubular (CFST) hybrid structures. The standard has subsequently been adopted nationally in countries including the United Kingdom, Denmark, the Netherlands, and Belgium. He also served as Project Leader (ranked first) for ISO/TR 25439:2025, Design examples of concrete-filled steel tubular (CFST) hybrid structures in accordance with ISO 16521.

Dr. Hou received the First Prize of the Natural Science Award of the Ministry of Education of China in 2023 (ranked fourth), a Certificate of Recognition from ISO/TC 71 in 2023, the Standard Internationalization Talent Award of the Standardization Science and Technology Innovation Awards in 2024, and the ASCE Greater China Outstanding Young Engineer Award in 2025. He also received the Outstanding Presentation Award at the 2017 IStructE China Young Scholars Forum and was recognized as an Outstanding Reviewer for Structures in 2017. At Beihang University, he has been selected for the Young Top Talent Program and named a Xiaomi Young Scholar.

Dr. Hou welcomes applications from prospective master's and doctoral students with interdisciplinary backgrounds in structural engineering, intelligent transportation, intelligent construction, computer science, automation, communication engineering, mechanical engineering, and related fields.

Contact: houcc@buaa.edu.cn