While an engineer for Digital Equipment Corporation in the early 1990s, Karen Panetta co-invented the first digital twin of a CPU.
“When you build computer chips, there are billions of transistors,” she says. “You can’t look at everyone with a probe and a wire. Wouldn’t it be great if we could have a digital twin model and artificially break it under different conditions, and use that to find manufacturing defects?”
Panetta, now dean of graduate education for the School of Engineering at Tufts University and an IEEE Fellow, is also an innovator in the world of AI with her pioneering work in computer vision. And today, digital twins and AI are being combined in a way that amplifies the potential of each while creating new opportunities to do things previously out of reach for businesses. For example, digital twins are now being used in conjunction with AI to model diseases and human organs, monitor major infrastructure projects, analyze IT infrastructure, and much more.