DrDavid AYALA CABRERA

Dr David Ayala Cabrera is currently an Ad Astra Fellow and Lecturer/Assistant Professor at the UCD School of Civil Engineering.

He received his bachelor’s degree in Sanitary Engineering from the Universidad del Valle (Univalle, Colombia). He holds a Master's Degree in Hydraulic and Environmental Engineering, with distinction, from the Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV, Spain). David has been awarded a PhD in Water and Environmental Engineering by the UPV in 2015. His PhD degree has obtained the qualification of the “Cum Laude” mention, the “International doctor” mention and the “Extraordinary PhD Thesis Award 2017”. Following this, he has obtained a two years Postdoc position in Protection of Critical Infrastructures (Irstea, France) in 2018. His research focused on the Protection of Critical Infrastructure, including studies of resilience and cyber-physical attacks against water utilities. He has had the opportunity for collaboration as a senior researcher at ICCS (Athens, Greece), focused on the preparation and coordination of pilot plans of cyber-physical tools demonstrations. Recently, he worked as a Research Fellow at the KIOS Research and Innovation Center of Excellence at the University of Cyprus (Nicosia, Cyprus) in 2019.

David’s teaching experience includes the position of Adjunct professor in the Industrial Engineering Department of the UPV, Spain (in Fluid Mechanics), the co-supervision of PhD Thesis at UPV (in reference to non-destructive test - Ground Penetrating Radar, GPR, applications in Water Distribution Systems, WDSs) and the co-supervision of Master thesis (in WDS network analysis) at UPV. In addition, he has four years of experience in designing projects for municipal water distribution and wastewater networks (Colombia).

David has had the opportunity to participate in the STOP-IT project (European project H2020) about cyber-physical security for WDSs. He was a member of the Water Department at the Irstea, as a postdoctoral research fellow and he worked in the Franco-German project (Innovative Secure Sensor Networks and Model-Based Assessment Tools for Increased Resilience of Water Infrastructures – ResiWater) sponsored by The French National Research Agency – ANR (France) and Federal Ministry of Education and Research (Germany). During his period at Irstea, he also participated in the European project H2020 (Water Quality in Drinking Water Distribution Systems - WatQual). He has also been part of the research project (Applying intelligent data analysis tools in the technical management of water supply systems – IDAWAS) of the Spain’s Ministry of Education and Science. He participated and he led the innovation project (Updating Water Supply Networks Management – UWSNM) in the 17th edition of Innovact Campus Award (Reims, France). These projects sought the consolidation of the network’s information in aspects such as cybersecurity, resilience, vulnerability, biofilm development, and water leaks detection which are aimed to develop a tool in order to allow the improvement of the water quality and the decision-making process for WDSs management.

As far as his research approaches are concerned, all of them are mainly about KDD, Deep Learning (Convolutional Neural Networks), Big Data Analysis, Multi-Agent Systems, Machine Learning and Intelligent Data Analysis methods applied to a number of issues into resilience and vulnerability studies, cyber-attacks detection, smart cities, water distribution systems (evolution and detection of water leaks, network sectorization, optimization, among others), ground penetrating radar, thermal images, and other topics in Engineering.

David´s current research interests are focus on promoting the uses of non-destructive methods in buried asset assessment, the analysis of complex systems, protection of critical infrastructures and the uses of intelligent data analysis.

It will be my pleasure to discuss with students (PhD, Masters) or researchers who are looking to develop their ideas.