More than One Twin: Multiple Digital Twins in City Planning
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Date
17 Sep 2024
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Organiser
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Time
15:00 - 16:00
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Venue
GH201 / online@Zoom Map
Speaker
Prof. Michael Batty
Enquiry
Ms Anna Choi 34008158 anna.choi@polyu.edu.hk
Remarks
Meeting ID: 816 7930 1618 (Passcode: 0917) Reminder: For those who wish to receive a certificate of attendance, please use your FULL NAME to join the Zoom meeting. Your registered name and email should be the SAME as your Zoom login; otherwise, certificate of attendance will not be provided.
Summary
The idea of a Digital Twin has become ever popular as a way of using computation to improve real systems in a variety of domains. The notion that we can build more than one model of the same thing has taken off dramatically as computer power has increased exponentially to the point where what were once very complex large-scale models often taking hours or even days to run are now possible to implement in a matter of seconds. In this sense, we can run digital models over and over again varying their structure in such a way that we can explore the solution space of the real system using the analogy of the twin. We will outline what we now mean by a digital twin, showing how we can use different kinds of models to increase our understanding of our real systema and enabling us to invent new forms for their future. We will develop these ideas primarily in the context of city planning but extending our twins to different scales, to different models of the same real system but from different vantage points and coupling twins together to develop more comprehensive modelling. We will illustrate examples for London as well as our digital twin for British cities and we will conclude with some speculations on the fact that our future world will be composed of multiple twins, multiple models of the same thing, that are rapidly becoming the norm (Batty, 2024)
Keynote Speaker
Prof. Michael Batty
Bartlett Professor of Planning, University College London
Distinguished Visiting Chair Professor, PolyU LSGI
Professor Batty is Bartlett Professor of Planning, University College London, and Chair of the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA). He has worked on computer models of cities and their visualisation since the 1970s with his recent publications reflecting recent developments in urban science in Cities and Complexity (2005), The New Science of Cities (2013), and Inventing Future Cities (2018) all from The MIT Press. His recent book The Computable City (2023) is a history of how computers and digital technologies have and are changing the form and function of cities. From 1979 to 1990, he was Professor of Town Planning and Dean of the School of Environmental Design at the University of Wales at Cardiff and then from 1990-1995, Director of the National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis at the State University of New York at Buffalo. He is a Fellow of the British Academy (FBA), the Royal Society (FRS), and the Academy of Social Sciences. He was awarded the CBE in the Queen’s Birthday Honours List in 2004. He received the Gold Medal of the Royal Geographical Society (2015) and the Gold Medal of the Royal Town Planning Institute. He has been the editor of Environment and Planning B: Urban Analytics and City Science, since 1982. He is an overseas member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
