Bridging the Gap between Research and Practice

The gap between research in geotechnical safety and risk, and practice, is not just a gap, it is a yawning chasm. This keynote lecture will present a personal view, based on 50 years in the geotechnical industry, and call on first hand and second hand evidence gathered over those years, to show how wide and deep this chasm is, and will call for open discussion on what can and must be done to bridge the chasm, and make the practice of statistics part of the everyday work of all geotechnical engineers, so that proper assessments of uncertainty, risk, and reliability can also become a normal part of geotechnical practice. This is necessary for many reasons, but first and foremost is the misconception that deterministic analysis brings, that we are dealing with known fixed quantities

Keywords: risk, reliability, education, design.