Preface

Abstract

This is certainly a great way to end the year after organizing another remarkable conference in the year 2020. Unlike previous years, due to on-going pandemic, the 4th series of NCWE was held through the long distance mode (on-line). The decision to hold the virtual conference was made after a mutual consent was received from all the collaborators. As the future of the vaccine development and the progress was undecided the organizing committee was not ready to postpone the already planned event for the benefit of everyone involved. However, no compromise was made with the strict standard operating procedure (SOP) outlined by the government and also paying heed to the closure of international borders by many countries including Malaysia. These proactive measures were taken to minimize the physical contact among participants and to curb the spreading of COVID-19. Yet, NCWE did not fail to draw a lot of participants across the region including India, Pakistan, China, Bangladesh, Vietnam, Thailand and Japan. We from the organizing team were overwhelmed and felt privileged when we were given the opportunity to organise the 4th National Conference on Wind and Earthquake Engineering (NCWE) 2020 which was held virtually from the Chancellery Hall of Universiti Malaysia Pahang (UMP) on the 16th and 17th October 2020.This virtual conference was organized with the support from Universiti Sains Malaysia, Chongqing University (China), Beijing Jiaotong University (China) and the Universitas Syiah Kuala (Indonesia). The conference tentatives were divided into three parallel sections for each day. Each presenters were given options to either perform a 10 minutes virtual presentation using a live ZOOM application or otherwise a pre-recorded slide was shown followed by a Q & A slot which lasted 5 to 10 minutes. Also an hour was dedicated to each keynote presenters at the beginning of each parallel session. As expected, the papers submitted were more than 100 and fellow reviewers have put their heart and soul in making sure only the best quality research and technical papers were selected for virtual presentation and publication. In line with the theme of the conference “Get Ahead”, NCWE 2020 have seen much success in providing a common platform to discuss issues, challenges, opportunities and technologies relating with the wind and earthquakes engineering. This proved that no pandemic can stop the academic proliferation; in fact, we could not agree more when NCWE 2020 had reached a larger audience and a higher number of paper submissions were received indeed.This volume of conference proceedings not only has a good selection of refereed papers but there are more to it. You will find a compilation of 5 keynote lectures given by; Professor Dr. Yukio Tamura, a prominent professor at Chongqing University, China, Professor Dr. Shuyang Cao from Tongji University, China, Professor Ir. Dr. Taksiah A. Majid from Universiti Sains Malaysia, Dr. Ichwana Ramli, from Universitas Syiah Kuala, Indonesia and finally Associate Professor Dr. Guoqing Jing from the Beijing Jiaotong University. The most awaited presentation from Professor Tamura with his topic on ”Characteristics of pedestrian- level winds around tall and super-tall buildings: Effects of configurations, height, width, size, aspect ratio, and flow conditions’ gained full credits from the participants when many questions and comments were discussed before the next turn. The same acknowledgement was made for the topic “Physical and numerical modelling of Boundary-layer-wind-induced load on structures” presented by Professor Shuyang Cao. Many of the keynote topics discussed here were highly relevant with our daily life issues and triggered healthy discussions and sharing of knowledge among participants. Organizing committee also has made some effort to record all the keynote presentations and posted the videos on YouTube for the benefit of everyone.The National Conference on Wind and Earthquake Engineering (NCWE) of 2020 also served as a new platform to researchers and scholars from different disciplines that have interest in sustainable construction, agricultural technology and environmental sciences to share and discuss their research findings. There were some 100 participants including students, engineers, researchers and academicians who took part virtually and had many fruitful discussions and exchanges which again contributed to the success of this conference. Finally on behalf of the organizing committee of NCWE 2020, I would like to thank all the presenters and participants for their great support. Last but not least, let us join our hands together in supporting out front liners battling COVID-19 pandemic.Chairman, NCWE 2020 DR. MOHAMAD IDRIS ALI