Digital Twins: Challenges And Opportunities with Prith Banerjee, CTO, ANSYS

Various industries such as Manufacturing, Energy and Utilities, Automotive, Aerospace and Defense, Logistics and Transportation, and Building Management, have proposed the use of Digital Twins to aid the Design, Analysis, Build, Manufacturing, and Operations phases of asset-intensive industries. Digital Twins have a physical asset, a virtual asset (a simulation model of the asset), and a two-way information flow between the physical and virtual worlds using an IoT platform. While most companies use data-based analytics and machine learning to build Digital Twins, they require lots of training data and the accuracy is limited to the observed data. Some industries have started using physics-based simulation to build digital twins and while these approaches are accurate they require long computation times to deploy. Most recently, companies are using Hybrid approaches combining data-based analytics and physics-based approaches to build these digital twins that are very accurate and require less training data, and drive high operational efficiency of assets and process industries and manufacturing plants. For this meetup, we'll be hosting Prith Banerjee, CTO, ANSYS Inc. In this talk, Prith will discuss the challenges and opportunities of digital twins in various industries and the latest research approaches.

Prith Banerjee is Chief Technology Officer at ANSYS, a leader in engineering simulation. In this role, he leads the evolution of ANSYS' technology and champions the company's next phase of innovation and growth. Prior to that, he was Executive Vice President and Chief Technology Officer of Schneider Electric. Formerly, he was Managing Director of Global Technology R&D at Accenture. Earlier, he was Chief Technology Officer and Executive Vice President of ABB. Earlier, he was Senior Vice president of Research and Director of HP Labs. Formerly, he was Dean of the College of Engineering at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Formerly he was the Walter P. Murphy Professor and Chairman of ECE at Northwestern University. Prior to that, he was professor of ECE at the University of Illinois. In 2000, he was Founding CEO of AccelChip which was sold to Xilinx Inc. in 2006. During 2005-2011, he was Founder, Chairman and Chief Scientist of BINACHIP. His research interests are in electronic design automation, and parallel computing, and he is the author of about 350 research papers. He has also supervised 37 Ph.D. students. Banerjee currently serves on the Board of Directors of Cubic Corporation and Software Motor Company. In the past, he has served on Boards for Cray, Inc., the Anita Borg Institute, the Computer Science Board of the National Academy of Engineering and the Technical Advisory Boards of Ambit, Atrenta , Calypto, and Cypress. He was listed in the FastCompany list of 100 top business leaders in 2009. He is a Fellow of the AAAS, ACM and IEEE and a recipient of the 1996 ASEE Terman Award and the 1987 NSF Presidential Young Investigator Award. He received a B.Tech. (President's Gold Medalist) in electronics engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, and an M.S. and Ph.D. in electrical engineering from the University of Illinois, Urbana.

Ansys provides engineering simulation tools that are used to design and engineer rockets, airplanes, cars, mobile devices, bridges and wearable technology. Founded in 1970, Ansys employs more than 4,400 professionals, many of whom are expert M.S. and Ph.D.-level engineers in finite element analysis, computational fluid dynamics, electronics, semiconductors, embedded software, and design optimization.