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Indian origin engineers use digital twins to tackle real-world problems
A digital twin is a dynamic, continuously updated digital representation of a physical object or system.
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Malvika Choudhary - Sat, 05, Apr 2025
- 14:16 EDT
- 93
Left to right, Baskar Ganapathysubramanian, Adarsh Krishnamurthy and Soumik Sarkar / Photos by Christopher Gannon.
A team of Indian-origin engineers at Iowa State University is pioneering the use of “digital twins” — real-time, data-driven virtual replicas — to reshape agriculture, healthcare, and manufacturing through artificial intelligence.
Baskar Ganapathysubramanian, Adarsh Krishnamurthy, and Soumik Sarkar, who lead the university’s Translational AI Center, are spearheading multiple initiatives where digital twins serve as powerful tools to simulate and optimize real-world systems.
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A digital twin is a dynamic, continuously updated digital representation of a physical object or system. These models mimic the structure and behavior of their real-world counterparts and are increasingly being used to make predictions, improve decision-making, and reduce time-to-market across industries.
A 2024 report by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine noted that digital twins hold “immense promise in accelerating scientific discovery and revolutionizing industries.”
At the AI Institute for Resilient Agriculture — a $20 million research center launched in 2021 with funding from the U.S. National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Agriculture — researchers are using digital twins to improve crop productivity. Weekly data collected from millet plants in a university greenhouse are transformed into 3D models using neural radiance fields (NeRF), creating high-fidelity simulations that mimic plant growth and development.
“This is all leading to AI for end-uses,” said Ganapathysubramanian, the Joseph and Elizabeth Anderlik Professor in engineering and director of the AI institute. “A digital twin needs real-time data from its physical counterpart.”
The institute’s research includes collaborations with agronomy faculty such as Arti Singh and Asheesh (Danny) Singh. Their work aims to help develop crops resilient to environmental stress, improve agricultural practices, inform policy making, and support precision farming.
In the healthcare sector, mechanical engineering professor Ming-Chen Hsu is developing personalized digital twins of the human cardiovascular system. These models, fed by data from wearable devices and medical tests, aim to detect heart conditions early. Collaborating with assistant professor Abhay Ramachandra, the team is also using mouse models to simulate aging processes, backed by a NSF grant.
In manufacturing, Krishnamurthy is applying digital twins to optimize 3D printing processes under the federal Materials Genome Initiative. His work focuses on a method called Digital Light Processing, which uses varying wavelengths of light to create complex structures with distinct material properties. “We can run thousands of experiments in tandem,” he said. “And we know for sure we’re replicating the physics of the real world.”
“The Translational AI Center is helping us to manage these large efforts with many investigators and many students,” said Sarkar. The center supports cross-disciplinary collaboration in fields such as plant science, computer science, and mechanical engineering.
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