Published: 17 May 2024
The Malaysian Geotechnical Society (MGS) at the ISSMGE has submitted a compilation of publications to record the knowledge contribution by Malaysian geotechnical engineers to the various conferences held in Malaysia. These included the following in chronological order:
- Malaysian Geotechnical Conference, 2004
- The 19th Southeast Asian Geotechnical Conference 2016
- 1st MGS - GEOSS Geotechnical Conference 2019
The diverse fields of interests selected by the authors were categorized as per the themes of the individual conferences from the available proceedings documents and are tabulated in the summary table:
Feedback
Data visualization tools available online were employed to consider the trend in the changing themes and the diversification of geotechnical fields by the Malaysian Geotechnical Community and to unearth probing questions among the broader themes of the Time Capsule Project:
Collective experience relevant to the broader geotechnical community enabling conversations across the individual membership.
Figure 1: Alluvial diagram of trends in choice of geotechnical themes.
By far, the field of Properties & Characterization of Soils and Ground Improvement & Stabilization throughout the three conferences, have remained the desired choice among the authors and not surprisingly the Field Testing & Performance Monitoring has gained interest in 2016 and 2019.
Probing Question 1
Have there been any internal or external changes or the application to projects that have altered or reaffirmed the choices?
Probing Question 2
Were these choices reinforced by a general trend of the worldwide geotechnical community or dependent upon each of the individual National membership?
Road map that helps current and future geotechnical engineers to access past and stir curiosity.
Previously, many of the conferences and publications missed the pivotal element of assigning keyword which remains the norm today and without which hardly any journal or committee would accept the paper or research. This naturally has the flaw when conducting a literature review of the previous research already published.
Probing Question 3
How far has been the Malaysian research digitized and rendered searchable? How does this compare to other individual membership groups of the ISSMGE?
Probing Question 4
Has the community be trained to tag the apt word for milestones along the historical journey of the research, so that it is not inadvertently excluded when accessing past publications?
To allow the upcoming cohort to tell the story of the member society and address challenges of future.
Newer trends are visible in the following fields building upon the past research activities of the Country:
- Geotechnology
- Design Analysis and Methodology
- Geotechnical Mitigation and Adaptation to Climate Change - induced Geo-disasters & Geotechnology for Natural Hazards
Of course, properties and characterization of soils remains essential to improve and stabilize the soil. This trend does not seem to be surprising as Malaysia has seen considerable reduction in Forest area from 2004 to 2010 which has then seen efforts seen by the Country to combat the deforestation. This is also coupled with the number of internally displaced people that the Country has seen. A natural correlation to the loss of forest cover is the treatment of soil/retention using technologies and mitigation measures.
Probing Question 5
How can we develop a story board or stepping stones to iterate a story over each of the fields and how do different subgroups merge to benefit from one another?
Probing Question 6
Are there any trends we can follow in our pedagogical experiences and efforts?
Probing Question 7
Has the change in the academia (interests of the teaching body itself) resulted in a shift to the other fields?
While all these questions present tasks to expand and develop the geotechnical community both Nationally in Malaysia and then continuing the sprinting cycle to other individual memberships if possible, the most intimidating question and the task ahead remains to understand more than 55% decline in authorship in 2019.
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MGS presented their input to the ISSMGE Time Capsule Project. This resource is the author's feedback/summary on the report presented.
Categories
Data Management
Keywords
ISSMGE, Malaysia, MGS, Geotechnical