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Corruption is a social evil that resonates far and deep in societies, eroding trust in governance, weakening the rule of law, impairing economic development, and exacerbating poverty, social tension, and inequality. It is a multidimensional and complex societal malady that occurs in various forms and contexts. As such, any effort to combat corruption must be accompanied by a thorough examination of the attributes that might play a key role in exacerbating or mitigating corrupt environments. This dissertation identifies a number of attributes that influence corruption, using machine learning techniques, neural network analysis, and time series causal relationship analysis and aggregated data from 113 countries from 2007 to 2017. The results suggest that improvements in technological readiness, human development index, and e-governance index have the most profound impacts on corruption reduction. This dissertation discusses corruption at each phase of infrastructure systems development and engineering ethics that serve as a foundation for corruption mitigation. The dissertation then applies novel analytical efficiency measurement methods to measure infrastructure inefficiencies, and to rank infrastructure administrative jurisdictions at the state level. An efficiency frontier is developed using optimization and the highest performing jurisdictions are identified. The dissertation’s framework could serve as a starting point for governmental and non-governmental oversight agencies to study forms and contexts of corruption and inefficiencies, and to propose influential methods for reducing the instances. Moreover, the framework can help oversight agencies to promote the overall accountability of infrastructure agencies by establishing a clearer connection between infrastructure investment and performance, and by carrying out comparative assessments of infrastructure performance across the jurisdictions under their oversight or supervision.

The intricacy of the construction practices sometimes causes the vague atmosphere between clients, partners, and providers, is one of the Achilles heels of infrastructure projects; this grounds the industry as the most inefficient, corrupted business in the world. Governments, in recent years, have made a significant positive effort on public transparency. E-government is an effective tool to execute the very subject. Not only e-government helps transparency, but also it provides openness, accountability, the participation of citizens, etc. By giving citizens access to the functionality of public organizations and institutions, and providing open media for public debates, nations can obtain higher levels of transparency and efficiency in activities. In turn, this policy can significantly reduce the instances of corruption too. It is worth to note that eliminating the corrupted officials would not necessarily reduce the instances of corruption. In this research, the effect of the human development index and transparency on the level of corruption in the world is assessed using GIS. Results show that, e-government is a tool for linking the available information and communication technologies together to provide public openness. However, abusing the citizens using their private data, hiding the available corruption in the top levels of the governmental organizations, accessing the businesses bank accounts to extract the transactions, etc. are among the common ways which e-government is exploited in some countries.

Close to 60% of energy produced in the U.S. is wasted as heat, which can be directly converted into electricity using thermoelectric (TE) technology via the Seebeck effect. However, the potential use of TE technology for energy harvesting has not been fully explored yet, especially in civil infrastructure applications. Therefore, the aim of this work is to investigate the possibility of developing TE concrete by incorporating semiconductor nanoparticles, such as zinc oxides (ZnO) and ZnO alloys in cement paste. This study has systematically evaluated the influence of aluminum ZnO (AZO) nanoparticles and undoped zinc oxide (ZnO) nanoparticles on the thermoelectric, hydration, and rheological behavior of portland cement paste. In order to elucidate the thermoelectric efficiency of semiconductors nanoparticles in cement paste, physical and chemical experiments were performed on ordinary portland cement pastes with water to binder ratio of 0.35 dosed with 0, 0.2, 0.4, 0.6, 0.8, and 1% weight fraction of ZnO and AZO nanoparticles. At the SMART Lab at Purdue, the thermoelectric behavior was evaluated with a newly developed test method of Seebeck coefficient measurement on cementitous materials, along with electrical and thermal conductivity measurements. In order to elucidate the chemical aspects of the hydration properties, X-ray diffractometry