Foreword: 2018 International Symposium on Rail Infrastructure Systems Engineering (i-RISE 2018)

Social and economic growth, security and sustainability around the globe are at risk of beingcompromised due to aging and failing railway infrastructure systems. This partly reflects arecognised skill shortage in railway infrastructure engineering. This international symposium hasthus been established to cross-disciplinary develop practical and scientific skills for the nextgeneration of capable railway engineers. The symposium is part of a project, RISEN, aims to enhanceknowledge creation and transfer using both international and intersectoral secondment mechanismsamong European Advanced Rail Research Universities/SMEs and Non-EU, world-class railuniversities including the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign (USA), MassachusettsInstitute of Technology (USA), University of California Berkeley (USA), Southwest JiaotongUniversity (China), Tsinghua University (China), University of Wollongong (Australia), RailwayTechnical Research Institute (Japan), University of Sao Paolo (Brazil), and Iranian University ofScience and Technology (Iran). The European rail universities include the University of Birmingham(UK), KTH Royal Institute of Technology (Sweden), Polytechnic University of Milan (Italy), TampereUniversity of Technology (Finland), University of Porto (Portugal), Norwegian University of Scienceand Technology (Norway), Brno University of Technology (Czech), Delft University of Technology(The Netherlands), and Polytechnic University of Valencia (Spain). Industry partners are MerMec(France), RoadScanners (Finland), Evoleo Technologies (Portugal) and Evoleo GmbH (Germany). Inaddition, the key sponsors are China Academy of Railway Sciences (China), Japan Society for thePromotion of Science (Japan) and EU COST Actions. This project adds research skill mobility andinnovation dimension to existing bilateral collaborations between universities through researchexchange, joint research supervision, summer courses, international training and workshops, andjoint development of innovative inventions. It spans over 4 years from April 2016 to March 2020. Theauthors are therefore sincerely grateful to the European Commission for the financial sponsorship ofthe H2020-RISE Project No. 691135 “RISEN: Rail Infrastructure Systems Engineering Network”,which enables a global research network that tackles the grand challenge of railway infrastructureresilience and advanced sensing in extreme environments (www.risen2rail.eu).