CBMR is pleased to announce the participation of Jorge López-Molina as a speaker at the X Latin American Rock Mechanics Symposium (LARMS 2026), to be held from August 26 to 28, 2026, in Brasília (DF), Brazil, alongside the XXII Brazilian Congress on Soil Mechanics and Geotechnical Engineering (COBRAMSEG 2026).

With over 20 years of applied experience in geomechanics across civil, energy, and mining infrastructure, Jorge López-Molina has contributed to more than 30 high-impact projects in rock mass characterization, underground and open-pit excavation design, geological-geotechnical hazard management, and grouting treatment design. His work increasingly integrates artificial intelligence and machine learning with traditional rock engineering methods. A member of the ISRM Rock Grouting Committee, he currently serves as Head of the Rock Mechanics and Grouting Department at CFE (Comisión Federal de Electricidad) and as Postgraduate Professor of Rock Mechanics at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM).

His lecture, titled "AI-Driven Rock Mass Characterization: From 'Ugly Data' to Robust Geomechanical Models", will present an AI framework, including supervised learning for property estimation and spatial modeling, that fuses hard and soft data. A key experimental component benchmarks five multimodal large language models (LLMs) against 32 engineers in zero-shot GSI estimation from outcrop images. Results show that AI amplifies, rather than replaces, engineering judgment, enabling the concept of the Augmented Engineer.

More information: larms2026.com