‘From Digital Twins to the Metaverse’ Topic of Computing Lecture April 4 at UW

Barbara Ryan will give the Geringer Distinguished Lecture in GIS Policy Friday, April 4, at the University of Wyoming.

Hosted by UW’s School of Computing, Ryan, an Earth observation advocate, will discuss “From Digital Twins to the Metaverse” from 2:30-4:30 p.m. in Room 506 of Coe Library. The program is free and open to the public.

Ryan will share insights from her career in environmental governance, science and technology, and international collaboration. She is a strong advocate for open data policies, the integration of Earth observations, and hyper-partnering to ensure that existing and planned resources can be more effectively used to address the major environmental and social issues facing the world today.

“Once the domain of the manufacturing environment, digital twins are increasingly being designed, developed and used to model our physical world,” Ryan explains about her lecture topic. “Examples include digital twins of our brains, bodies, homes, towns and cities, counties, states, countries, continents, oceans and even the Earth.”

But, with most organizational structures, “these digital twins are almost always siloed, not integrated or integrable, and therefore, suboptimized for a truly systematic, system of systems view of the entire Earth,” Ryan adds.

“Simultaneously, most view the metaverse as only a gaming environment and, while games are important and generate significant revenue both nationally and globally, we instead should view the metaverse as a virtual representation of the universe,” Ryan says. “Like metadata -- structured data that describes and explains other data -- the metaverse is, or should be, structured data that describes and explains the universe.”

During her presentation, both challenges and opportunities will be explored based on Ryan’s 50-year career working in national and international public and nonprofit sectors.

For more information, call the UW School of Computing at (307) 766-5299.