Readers who have recently visited or purchased a newly built house may have started to notice the standard inclusion of \"smart home\" technologies. The smart system can automatically control environmental parameters, such as temperature or window shading, based on the ambient conditions or can be sent via verbal request to go on online shopping errand. Security systems linked to the smart system can alert residents of potential visitors based on the integrated motion detectors, and increasingly, who the visitor is, using advanced facial recognition software. Such smart home functionalities are the fruits harvested from decades of research in network technologies, artificial intelligence, embedded electronics, advanced sensors, among others. Numerous researchers around the globe have innovated and labored long hours to bring cutting edge ideas to life and finally to application. Thus, despite the highly complex mathematics and engineering that drives smart home systems, an increasingly large part of the population has started to take such innovations for granted. Even the lay person has a functional, albeit naive understanding of such systems and can seamlessly use them to improve their lives. However, the smart home is only one of many microcosms that comprise the larger realm of the so-called structural health monitoring (SHM) [1, 2, 3]. Zooming out to the big picture, one can see that society lives in and is supported by numerous, intersecting layers of large-scale infrastructure. We rely on the transportation infrastructure to go to work or get back home; we need the sewage system to keep our living places hygien; we depend on the energy network to power our devices and appliances. The list can go on, and while we may not notice when everything works as intended, if any layer of infrastructure is suddenly made absent, society can come to a standstill. Thus, the health of infrastructure is paramount in the list of national priorities. This notion is paralleled by the National Academy of Engineers Grand Challenges for restoring urban infrastructure. For infrastructure, the main antagonists to good infrastructural health are corrosion [4, 5], vibration and fatigue [6, 7, 8], aging [9], natural and man-made disasters [10, 11], which work to either gradually or rapidly induce structural failure [12, 13]. For years, we have relied on manual inspections to detect damage and determine whether remediation was necessary. This reliance on manual labor is time consuming and highly skill dependent. Damages deep within concrete structures may not be realized until it is too late [14, 15]. The result is a pressing situation in which large swaths of structures across the nation are in desperate need of maintenance and improvements, as highlighted by the dismal infrastructural grade issued by the National Report Card in 2017. We have furthermore arrived at a point at which we need to consider the future where an increasing population will place even further loads onto the already strained infrastructure. Recognizing the implications of this impending crisis, researchers from all types of backgrounds are racing to innovate technologies that can revolutionize our current way of dealing with infrastructure that is each day accumulating damage that is not always visible even to the trained eye. The range of research, partly captured in this issue, is stratified from foundational research into the behavior of structures to prototype systems that are soon ready for commercialization. Some examples of research directed towards better understanding of structural behavior in this special issue include the modeling of various structural responses to normal and disaster level loads. Researchers have worked on modeling the behavior of structural components such as columns and shear walls [16; 17], as well as different types of transportation infrastructure such as roads, railways, tunnels, and bridges [18; 19; 20; 21; 22]. In areas prone to typhoons, researchers modeled the behavior of high-rises to strong winds [23; 24].