Knowledge Snack: Digital Twins of infrastructure and the environment

The idea of an Intelligent Digital Avatar conjures up many images from a complete virtual world that one can safely define, develop and play in to rogue robots running amok and destroying mankind. The reality is much less dramatic but no less far reaching and exciting. —Professor Mark Girolami

Professor Mark Girolami will discuss Digital Twins and chart their history to present day technological capability and present some of the advances being made and the opportunities along with the open challenges faced to realise the potential of Digital Twins. Mark’s talk will be followed by BAS AI researcher Scott Hosking, who will touch upon how developing Digital Twins of natural environments can help us intelligently focus our measurement sampling, which would be a game-changer over remote and hostile environments such as the polar regions where battery power and accessibility is challenging. His team at BAS is already developing and deploying new AI-based methods to bring together the diverse scientific and engineering expertise and data held at BAS, and from 2021 will start to align and integrate those efforts with those of the European Green Deal, i.e., to develop a Digital Twin of the Earth by 2030.

16:00 Opening welcome by BAS Director of Innovation and Impact, Beatrix Schlarb-Ridley

16:03 Mark Girolami

16:18 Scott Hosking

16:33 Q&A & discussion, moderated by BAS Impact Facilitator, Pilvi Muschitiello

To join the talk please fill in the registration form at the bottom of the page—A calendar invitation with Zoom details will be sent to you following registration.

Speaker biographies:

Mark Girolami holds the Sir Kirby Laing Chair of Civil Engineering at the University of Cambridge where he also holds the Lloyds Register Foundation-Royal Academy of Engineering Research Chair in Data Centric Engineering in the Department of Engineering at Cambridge. Mark was one of the founding executive directors of the Alan Turing Institute the UK national institute for Data Science and AI. He is Programme Director at the Turing where he leads the £60M Lloyds Register Foundation Data Centric Engineering programme. He has a background in the Statistical Sciences and held the Chair of Statistics in the Department of Mathematics at Imperial College London before his election to the Sir Kirby Laing Chair at Cambridge. In January 2020 he delivered the IET/BCS Turing Lectures in London, Manchester and Belfast on ‘Digital Twins the next phase of the AI revolution’. You can access a recording of the talk here.

—

Scott Hosking is the Head of the Artificial Intelligence (AI) Lab at the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) environmental research institute, and a Senior Research Fellow at The Alan Turing Institute the UK national institute for data science and AI. Scott is also a Co-Director for the University of Cambridge Centre for Doctoral Training in the Application of Artificial Intelligence to the study of Environmental Risks (AI4ER), a £6m UKRI funded programme to train over 50 top students to become future global leaders in environmental science. His research group focuses on AI and data science methods to identify and understand the physical mechanisms that drive high-impact climate events with the aim to reduce uncertainties in future predictions and help inform environmental policy.