Issue 06 | Aug 2025
Forging New Frontiers
Civil and Environmental Engineering
How to train your machine (to understand how the ground behaves)
A neural network meets century-old soil theory — and learns to predict what happens when the ground starts to sink.
H
ave you heard of the curious case of sinking skyscrapers?
In downtown San Francisco, the Millennium Tower, a luxury high-rise completed in 2009, has sunk more than 18 inches and tilted about 22 inches to one side. It wasn’t a design flaw in the building itself. It was the ground beneath it — soft, compressible and consolidating under the immense weight.
Graphic images in this newsletter were generated using AI and intended only as a visualisation of general concepts or ideas related to the research.