The concept of a digital twin—creating an authentic virtual counterpart to a physical entity—has deep roots in human history, across cultures. From ancient analogues like architectural models, astronomical devices, table top battle replicas, and even philosophical paradigms, humans have long sought ways to represent reality in compelling, but controllable, accessible, and insightful forms. Geographic maps themselves can certainly be seen to embody this concept.
Today, a confluence of advances in sensing and data collection, computational power, modeling paradigms such as AI/ML, and immersive visualization techniques are enabling accurate and responsive reality twins at scale, that can drive smart cities, predict natural hazards, and optimize industrial processes. Whether in geospatial or more localized spatial realms, digital twins are leading to such transformations as personalized models of the human heart, predictive models for safeguarding infrastructure, and earth scale sea level prediction.
Hosted by the Center for Geographic Analysis at Harvard and co-sponsored by the Institute for Quantitative Social Science, and others, this conference aims to foster a dialogue between diverse digital twin perspectives, and bring together experts from industry, government, NGOs and academia. Topics may include geospatial and physics-based modeling, augmented reality, big data processing, high-performance computing, scripting and workflows, replicability, explainability, interoperability, ethical standards, among others.
The event will start with a half-day pre-conference workshop Thursday morning, followed by a day and a half of plenary sessions on Thursday afternoon and Friday, which will include keynote addresses, presentation sessions, panel discussions, and lightning talks. Saturday will continue the conference virtually.
On Thursday and Friday, speaker and audience engagement will be in person, while the Zoom audience will be able to view, but not participate in the discussions. On Saturday, all proceedings will be virtual via Zoom, without any in-person activity.
Topics include, but are not limited to:
The conference is accepting abstract submissions for oral or poster presentations (less than 500 words) before Feb 28, 2025. Detailed agenda and lodging information will be sent to accepted presenters later. Participants are responsible for their own travel and lodging expenses. Please contact the organizing committee if you have any questions.
Please refer to this page for information on lodging and transportation around Harvard campus.
LOCATION:CGIS South STATUS:CONFIRMED DTSTART:20250522T040000Z DTEND:20250524T040000Z END:VEVENT END:VCALENDAR