Predictive Digital Twins at Scale: Graphical Formulations to Manage Uncertainty and Complexity

Speaker: Karen E. Willcox, Director, Oden Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences, The University of Texas at Austin

When: Thursday, April 3, 2025, 2–3 pm

Where: Warnock Engineering Building, Evans Conference Room (WEB 3780), University of Utah, 72 S Central Campus Dr, Salt Lake City, UT 84112

Abstract
Our work has proposed graphical models and graph-based methods as fundamental enablers of digital twins. Graph-based representations are well known to be suited for describing complex systems where the connections between entities are as important as the entities themselves. The interconnections within and across data, models, and decisions are central to a digital twin’s value. Not only does a graph emphasize the scalable representation of such interrelationships, it also provides a natural mathematical setting for addressing uncertainty and complexity—arguably the two biggest barriers to scalable deployment and adoption of digital twins. We discuss how recent advances in theory and algorithms for large-scale knowledge graphs and graphical models can be combined in a multi-layered formulation to provide a powerful foundation for achieving scalable digital twins for complex systems. We illustrate our approaches for two complementary examples: a space system digital twin built around a core of physics-based models and an educational digital twin built around data representing dynamic academic pathways of millions of transfer students across the state of Texas.

Biography
Karen E. Willcox is Director of the Oden Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences, Associate Vice President for Research, and Professor of Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics at The University of Texas at Austin. She is also External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute. Before joining the Oden Institute in 2018, she spent 17 years as a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she served as the founding Co-Director of the MIT Center for Computational Engineering and the Associate Head of the MIT Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics. Prior to joining the MIT faculty, she worked at Boeing Phantom Works with the Blended-Wing-Body aircraft design group. She is a Fellow of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM), Fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA), Fellow of the US Association for Computational Mechanics (USACM), and member of the National Academy of Engineering (NAE). She was the recipient of the 2023 J.T. Oden Medal and the 2024 Theodore von Karman Prize.