Riding on the success from its inaugural year, Infrastructure Advancement Institute (IAI) has enjoyed yet another successful event at College Station with its IAI Summit 2016.

IAI Summit 2016 attracted double the consultant participants this year, and continues to provide meaningful and useful technical programs. More importantly, IAI went through its Strategic Visioning exercise the spring of 2016, and it integrated many of its vision into the program at IAI Summit 2016. 

Specifically, it enlisted the entire conference attendees in its highly interactive joint session that was designed as a facilitated format session in order to engage participants in IAI. Additionally, many technologies were employed to allow IAI Summit to engage participants in a more meaningful way. Among which was a special session on claim avoidance, which was designed to be both highly entertaining (engineers pretend to be contractors and vice versa, in a fictitious skit) and highly educational as well.

Facebook Live was employed to broadcast the session for free to allow for people who would otherwise have no access to the session to view the session, even today. The program can still be viewed at facebook.com/USAIAI. TxDOT Deputy Executive Director Marc Williams was involved in an Alternative Delivery Session that was highly engaging and educational.

Outside of engaging technical programs, IAI Summit 2016 continued to promote strong networking amongst participants by utilizing Gamification within its conference app. Conference attendees highly enjoyed the new app. The main event this year was a combination of game watching and casino night, where participants were free to mingle or try to win money for their favorite charity through the Casino Night setup at the ballroom. The main event provided a platform for people to engage each other for fun and for networking. 

This year's sponsors came through in a big way to allow IAI to continue put on another successful event. Special thanks go out to Michael Baker International (Founding Five Member), Huitt-Zollars and Aguirre & Fields (Gold Sponsors), and LJA Engineering and CP&Y (Bronze Sponsors). Without their financial and active participations, IAI would not be able to put on the IAI Summit 2016.

IAI is currently planning its IAI Summit 2017, which will take place in Austin, Texas. IAI looks forward to another successful and fun, yet educational and meaningful conference next year. Any exhibitors and sponsors interested in reaching out to engineers next year, please contact IAI at info@usaiai.org.