Guest Editorial
During the past year, the ROSE School, i.e. the Centre for Post-Graduate Training and Research in Earthquake Engineering and Engineering Seismology, has evolved under the tireless leadership of Professor Michele Calvi to become the UME School. The UME School is the new postgraduate school in Understanding and Managing Extremes, which aims to create a comprehensive framework in which master and doctoral students can study, understand, and deal with risks caused by natural and human-made extreme events.
The UME School (www.umeschool.it) is part of the Institute for Advanced Study of Pavia (IUSS, www.iusspavia.it). It is managed by the EUCENTRE Foundation (www.eucentre.it) and builds on the successful experience of the ROSE School. Currently, the School runs two programs. In addition to the traditional program in Earthquake Engineering and Engineering Seismology — which is still characterized by the well known nickname ROSE — a new one on Risk and Emergency Management (REM) started in the academic year 2011/2012. A unique characteristic of the new program is the broad, interdisciplinary curriculum that includes topics of statistics and probability, law, economics, resource management, natural and human-made hazards and risk, finance, insurance, sociology, communication, psychology, public health and medicine. Both programs share the same academic philosophy: Courses are intensively taught in a series with a typical duration of one to four weeks, during which students and lecturer fully devote themselves to the topic, creating a unique synergy setting and the base for an education at the highest possible level of quality. The teaching body of the UME School comprises more than one hundred internationally recognized experts in the fields of earthquake engineering, seismology, structural engineering, and risk mitigation, as well as in the variety of fields that characterize the REM Program. The lecturers stem from more than 60 different academic institutions from all over the world, perfectly reflecting the multidisciplinary and international nature of the School.
A key component of the educational program of the previous ROSE School and the current UME School is represented by the International ROSE Seminar, which took place for the eleventh time in 2011, and which provides the students of the ROSE Program with an invaluable opportunity to present and discuss their research work to an audience of international experts. It goes without saying that the next editions of the seminar will reflect the increased multidisciplinary nature of the School, although at the moment it is still premature trying to predict the evolution of the seminar. Next to the presentations by the students, it is an established tradition to invite an eminent scholar to deliver a keynote lecture on an important and actual topic pertaining to earthquake engineering and/or engineering seismology. At the Eleventh ROSE Seminar, the keynote address was delivered by Professor Paolo Emilio Pinto from the Sapienza University of Rome and was titled “Probabilistic Seismic Assessment of Buildings in Practice.”
This Special Issue provides a selection of the works presented at the Eleventh ROSE Seminar by master and doctoral students as well as recent alumni of the School. All contributions underwent a rigorous review process prior to publication. It is hoped and believed that the quality of the papers collected here and the diversity in their contents will be a useful resource for the development of earthquake engineering, and will stimulate further discussion and research on the presented topics. It is also hoped that this Special Issue will provide an incentive to students in earthquake engineering and risk management worldwide to join the School in the coming years, and both benefit from and contribute to its unique learning environment.
Alessandro Dazio
UME School
Pavia, Italy