Paolo Bellavista, Professor, AEiC of IEEE COMST, EiC of MDPI Computers EB Member of IEEE TNSM & TSC, ACM CSUR & TIOT, Elsevier PMC & JNCA DISI - University of Bologna, Italy
Abstract: Digital twins are becoming a crucial tool for both design purposes (e.g., dimensioning before implementation – offline digital twins) and efficiency goals (e.g., online reconfiguration to improve quality – online digital twins), by posing several, still open, technical challenges to their effective implementation. In particular, the keynote speech will focus on the emerging directions of hybrid (synergically exploiting simulations and data-driven machine learning models) and distributed (running also in cloud continuum edge nodes, e.g., for federated learning and efficient after-training operations) digital twins. Practical examples of implemented testbeds with edge cloud nodes supporting digital twins will be described from the IoTwins H2020 project, in the vertical domains of industrial manufacturing plants and smart city management optimization.
Biography: Paolo Bellavista is a Full Professor of mobile and distributed systems at the University of Bologna, Italy. His primary research interests include middleware for mobile computing, digital twins for Industry4.0 and smart city applications, QoS management in the cloud continuum, infrastructures for big data processing in industrial environments, and performance optimization in wide-scale and latency-sensitive deployment scenarios. Related to digital twins, he was the scientific coordinator of the H2020 IoTwins project (completed in Winter 2022). Additional details at https://www.unibo.it/sitoweb/paolo.bellavista/en