On any given day, the College of Engineering’s diverse and dedicated faculty, students and alumni produce significant research contributions through peer-reviewed journal articles, scholarly books and book chapters. Learn more about those contributions in this month’s Research Roundup. To have your work considered for a future roundup, submit your research here.

Civil and Environmental Engineering

Stefan Talke

Civil and environmental engineering professor Stefan Talke and colleagues recently published the article "Coastal Flooding at Predictable Hours" in Nature Communications. The research shows that coastal flooding, often seen as sudden and unpredictable, can recur at consistent times of day in tide-dominated coastal systems. Using tide gauge records from the U.S. and U.K., the team found that coastal floods cluster around specific hours, such as near noon and midnight in Boston. Along the California coast, elevated water levels and large wave runup coincide with winter king tides and are most likely to occur in the morning. Knowing the most likely timing of coastal flooding offers new opportunities for emergency planning and risk communication.

Computer Science and Software Engineering

Venkata Kedarnath Chaturvedula, Fooad Khosmood and Franz Kurfess

Recent Cal Poly computer science graduate Venkata Kedarnath Chaturvedula and professors Foaad Khosmood, Franz Kurfess and Kim Lisagor Bisheff published “Predicting News Coverage Based on Legislative Information” in the Digital Humanities 2026 Book of Abstracts and presented the work at the ADHO Digital Humanities Conference in Daejeon, South Korea. Based on Chaturvedula’s master’s thesis, the research uses machine learning and legislative data to predict which California legislative activities are most likely to receive news coverage, achieving up to 89.91% accuracy when assessed against California legislative stories published by CalMatters. The work could help newsrooms identify important legislative stories that might otherwise go uncovered. The research was sponsored by CalMatters, a nonprofit news organization, and the Cal Poly Institute for Advanced Technology and Public Policy. Chaturvedula is now a software engineer at Lightmatter.  

Mechanical Engineering

Mohammad Noori

Mechanical engineering professor emeritus Mohammad Noori and his colleagues recently published the research article “Structural Recovery and Damage Prediction in GFRP-BFRP Patched Plates Using Hybrid SSA-SCA-XGBoost Model and Vibration Data” in Composite Structures. The research tested how two types of repair patches made from glass fiber and basalt fiber can strengthen damaged aluminum plates and restore their original strength. The team also built a new AI model to predict the extent of damage in these repairs. They found that glass fiber patches were better at restoring strength, while basalt fiber patches were better at absorbing vibrations. The team’s new AI model was also more accurate than existing methods at predicting damage.