Bence Kato, Ph.D., Assistant Professor. His research direction focuses on offshore and earthquake engineering incorporating explainable artificial intelligence. As an expert in soil-structure interaction (SSI) he primarily tackles regional-scale phenomena, such as site-city interaction, automated offshore foundation design for wind farms, and statistical approaches to urban safety and structural health assessment. The major tools in his arsenal to attack pressing civil engineering issues are advanced numerical modeling, explainable AI, and geotechnical experimentation. 

In 2020 Bence Kato graduated with a Ph.D. from Hong Kong University of Science and Technology focusing on geotechnical earthquake engineering; from 2020-2023 he was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Harbin Institute of Technology (Shenzen), where he switched his focus towards offshore engineering and artificial intelligence. His research interests include advanced numerical modeling of soil-structure interaction, explainable AI-powered geotechnical design, seismic site-city interaction, distributed optical fiber vibration sensing, and health monitoring or design of offshore wind turbines, amongst other fields. He is always looking at new horizons and is excited to delv into new fields of interdisciplinary research. As of 2023, he has won the RFIS-I national funding from NNSFC; he has published a total of 8 SCI papers; and a total of 3 international conference papers. According to Google Scholar statistics, his H-index is 7, and his publications have been cited over 150 times. He won the Best Paper Award at IACGE conference 2017, as well as in 2023 at the Geotechnical Conference in Hungary. Moreover, he has won Innovation Price for seismic isolation system at the 2017 IDEERS international competition in Taiwan, and recieved the outstanding postdoctor title at Harbin Institute of Technology (Shenzen).