International Conference «GEOTEC HANOI 2026»

   What happens underneath a bridge pier, a metro tunnel or an offshore wind turbine rarely gets discussed out loud. For two days at the end of November, the people who actually solve those problems worldwide will be doing exactly that in one hall in Hanoi. If you work in infrastructure, foundation design or soil mechanics research, you will not find a denser two days in the region this year.

   The sixth edition widens the scope. Alongside six established themes — deep foundations, tunnelling and underground spaces, ground improvement, landslide and erosion, geotechnical modelling and smart monitoring, offshore wind power and coastal geotechnics — it adds two that matter a great deal to Vietnam right now: applications of artificial intelligence in geotechnical engineering and geotechnics for high-speed railways.

   Each theme gets its own keynote lecture, and the roster is unusually strong:

• — Prof. Byron Byrne, Oxford University — design of monopiles for offshore wind turbines
• — Prof. David M. Potts, Imperial College London — simulating strain-softening behaviour and progressive failure
• — Prof. Tatsuya Ishikawa, Hokkaido University and chair of ISSMGE TC202 — transportation geotechnics for resilient high-speed railways
• — Prof. Limin Zhang, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology — AI and digital-twin empowered landslide risk management
• — Prof. Gang Zheng (Tianjin University), Prof. Xiangsheng Chen (Shenzhen University), Prof. Stefan Larsson (KTH Stockholm) and Prof. Raffaele Di Laora (University of Campania, secretary of ISSMGE TC212)

   There is also a special invited lecture by Prof. Arnold Dix, immediate past president of ITA-AITES, on disaster risk, communication failure and the human conditions for safe underground construction — framed explicitly around Vietnam's current infrastructure push. Prof. Erol Tutumluer of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign speaks on advanced sensing and modelling of ballasted track deformation.

   The audience is foundation and tunnel engineers, infrastructure contractors, design consultants, academics and doctoral researchers — plus anyone following infrastructure policy who wants to understand why a metro line or a wind farm runs late and over budget. The most valuable part is usually the corridor rather than the slides: the 2023 edition drew more than 1,200 participants from 40 countries across five continents.

   GEOTEC HANOI started in 2011 and has run in 2011, 2013, 2016, 2019 and 2023, with the two most recent editions held at the same National Convention Center in the Mễ Trì area of western Hanoi. It is co-organised by FECON Corporation, the Vietnam Society for Soil Mechanics and Geotechnical Engineering (VSSMGE) and the Chinese Institution of Soil Mechanics and Geotechnical Engineering (CISMGE), under the patronage of the International Society for Soil Mechanics and Geotechnical Engineering (ISSMGE).

   The fee tiers differ enough to be worth reading before you book. The full two-day package covers the book of abstracts, e-proceedings, lunches, the closing banquet and the pre-conference technical tour; separate rates exist for a single day, for attendance only, for authors of accepted papers and for Vietnamese students with proof of enrolment. Groups of four or more from one organisation, or co-authors of one paper, get 20% off. Registration requires a scan of your passport; Vietnamese participants may substitute a citizen identification card.

   The venue has two entrances — one from Đại lộ Thăng Long, one from đường Phạm Hùng — so name the gate when you order a taxi rather than circling the building.

   Secretariat: [email protected]. Payment and registration queries: [email protected]. Hotline (+84) 90 344 0978, Dr Dung, chief of the secretary board. Two days is a short trip for a field that thinks in decades — worth clearing the calendar.