Behrokh Khoshnevis

Contour crafting (CC) is a layered fabrication technology used in automated construction of whole structures as well as subcomponents. Using this process, a single house or a colony of houses, with variance in design, may be automatically constructed in a single run, with conduits for electrical, plumbing and air-conditioning embedded within. ^[7]

SIS is an additive manufacturing (AM) technology in which parts are built layer-by-layer from a powder base material. The SIS process involves the prevention of selected areas of powder layers from sintering. SIS may be considered a contrary approach to the Selective Laser Sintering (SLS) process, in which selected areas of powder are sintered by a fine laser beam. SIS takes advantage of bulk sintering in the body of the part, while inhibiting sintering at the part boundaries^[8] .^[9]

Khoshnevis's inventions have received coverage in The New York Times,^[10] Los Angeles Times,^[11] Business Week, Der Spiegel,^[12] New Scientist,^[13] receiving both US and international radio and television coverage.

Contour crafting was selected as one of the top 25 out of more than 4,000 candidate inventions by the History Channel program Modern Marvels and the National Inventor's Hall of Fame; and has been identified as one of the major disruptive technologies of the modern era.^[14] Contour crafting has been exhibited at numerous museums worldwide.

In 2014, Khoshnevis was selected as the recipient of the Grand Prize of the Creating the Future design contest, for invention of contour crafting robotic construction technology. The program was organized by NASA Tech Briefs Media Group, and sponsored by major industry leaders, including Intel and HP. The Grand Prize was given to one of more than 1000 globally competing technologies.^[15][16]

In 2016, Khoshnevis won a NASA international top prize for the In-Situ Challenge, a competition to build proposed structures on the Moon and Mars out of local planetary materials. Khoshnevis's proposal involved using his SSS technology for autonomous construction of landing pads and roads, as well as fabrication of interlocking bricks and other objects such as metallic tools and spare parts using in-situ materials.^[17]

In 2012, he featured in a TEDx presentation on automated construction with over 1.3 million views.^[18] His talk was later ranked by TED as a top five among more than 30,000 TEDx talks.^{[citation needed]}

In 2017, Khoshnevis was recognized by Connected World Magazine as a top 10 academic pioneer of IOT technologies.^{[citation needed]}

In 2018, he received the Pioneering award during the first RILEM digital concrete conference for its outstanding contribution to the field of concrete digital fabrication.^{[citation needed]}