Digital Twins & AI: Redesigning the Real World
Symposium Recordings: Recordings will be available exclusively to ILP members. To learn more about becoming a member, click here.
How are digital twins, empowered by AI, transforming the way we design, simulate, and operate systems across industry, infrastructure, urban environments, and cultural heritage?
In collaboration with the Bouygues Group, we are pleased to invite our distinguished members and attendees to the latest edition of the annual MIT Paris Symposium, convened in partnership with MIT researchers. This year’s theme, Digital Twins & AI: Redesigning the Real World, will explore how these converging technologies are revolutionizing the built environment.
The symposium will bring together leading researchers, technology innovators, and industry executives to examine real-world applications and share forward-looking insights. Join us for a dynamic and thought-provoking program designed to spark dialogue, foster collaboration, and illuminate the path toward a more intelligent and resilient world.
Registration Fee: Complimentary
Group Chief Innovation Officer, Bouygues
Christophe Lienard joined the Bouygues Group in 2011 and was appointed Chief Innovation Officer for Bouygues SA in September 2017. From 2013 to 2017, he was Chief Innovation Officer at Colas, one of the world leaders in mobility infrastructures, and created and ran the Colas Innovation Board. In October 2015, Colas announced the launch of Wattway to produce photovoltaic energy from roads, which won the climate solution trophy at COP21. Previously, Lienard was Deputy CEO and Director of the Anovo Group from and earlier started his career with the Swedish group Atlas Copco. Lienard is a graduate from “Arts et Métiers ParisTech,” a National Graduate Engineering School engineer, has an advanced degree from UPMC Paris on energy conversion, and an Executive MBA from ICG. He is a cofounder of the think tank Futura Mobility, a cofounder and Vice President of IMPACT-AI, and a member of the Scientific Committee of the Global Center for the Future.
Dr. Srinivasan is a distinguished scientist who received her PhD in Microbiology from The Ohio State University in 2004, where she contributed to the discovery of the 22nd amino acid, Pyrrolysine (2002). She first came to MIT as an NIH Postdoctoral Fellow in Prof. Tom Rajbhandary’s lab, where her research focused on understanding protein synthesis mechanisms in Archaea.
Dr. Srinivasan subsequently moved into the business development and technology licensing space, serving in MIT’s Technology Licensing Office, where she helped commercialize technologies in medical devices and alternative energies. She then moved to UMass Medical School’s Office of Technology Management in 2009 and to Emory University in Atlanta in 2014 as the Director of Public and Private Partnerships for the Woodruff Health Sciences Center. In 2019, Dr. Srinivasan joined Emory’s Office of Corporate Relations as Executive Director, and in 2021, she led the Office of Corporate and Foundation Relations.
Academic Research Fellow, MIT Center for Information Systems Research
Nils leads research on how established organizations realize greater strategic value faster from a portfolio of digital innovation initiatives. He collects and analyses in-depth, multi-year, qualitative data and survey data, identifying what investments, processes, and leadership practices distinguish top-performing organizations. His most recent research focuses on the value realization model of successful organizations – the system by which they use digital to realize strategy.
In 2010, he co-founded with CIONET the annual European Digital Leader of the Year Awards (https://www.cionet.com/edloty) to raise awareness of what effective digital leaders do.
Based in Madrid, Spain, Nils regularly conducts workshops for the top management teams of multi-national organizations, during which he presents and discusses MIT CISR research findings. The key objective of these workshops is to strengthen the participants’ common language and understanding of how organizations thrive with digital amidst uncertainty and scarce resources so that they can use digital more effectively to increase their organization’s resilience and impact.
From November 2008 until June 2014, Nils served as Associate Director of INSEAD eLab. Nils earned his PhD degree in Information Technology and Organization Studies from MIT Sloan School of Management, an MS from the MIT Technology and Policy Program, and a BS in Mechanical Engineering and BA in Film Studies from Cornell University.
Fun fact: Nils is an MIT brat. He grew up on MIT’s campus (e.g., he lived in Eastgate) and has seen it evolve for over 50 years.
In the face of increasing volatility and resource scarcity, many organizations continue to invest in digital yet aren’t sure what to do next to translate those investments into much greater bottom-line impact. Others retreat from digital innovation. Dr. Fonstad’s research finds that a few exceptional organizations do the opposite: they turn uncertainty into growth by doubling down on digital innovation. But they do so with a disciplined, test-and-learn approach for realizing their strategy with digital. Their value realization modelconsists of three key parts, each with a distinct set of leaders. Together, they generate strategic value systematically while mitigating risk. In this session, Dr. Fonstad will describe and discuss this approach to help participants identify opportunities to strengthen their organization’s value realization model.
Associate Director, MIT.nano Director of Technical Operations, Center for Clinical and Translational Research
Dr. Brian Anthony is a leading expert in the design of intelligent, or smart, instruments and methodologies for monitoring, measuring, and controlling complex physical systems. His interdisciplinary work spans mechanical, electrical, and optical engineering, seamlessly integrated with computer science and optimization, to deliver innovative solutions across manufacturing, healthcare, and other industries.
At the core of Dr. Anthony’s research is computational instrumentation—the development of advanced tools and techniques to observe and manage intricate systems, particularly in manufacturing and medical diagnostics. His contributions include pioneering measurement and imaging technologies that enhance precision and performance in both industrial and clinical settings.
With over 30 years of experience, Dr. Anthony combines deep academic insight with practical industry expertise in technology innovation, product development, and entrepreneurship. He has successfully guided market-driven solutions from concept to commercialization, especially at the intersection of information technology and advanced manufacturing. His achievements include receiving an Emmy Award from the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences for technical innovation in broadcast engineering.
In the classroom, Dr. Anthony is dedicated to teaching the modeling and analysis of large-scale systems to support decision-making in domains such as manufacturing, medicine, and entertainment. He also leads efforts in developing optimization algorithms and software tools for system design and evaluation.
Dr. Anthony’s dual roles in academia and industry position him as a bridge between cutting-edge research and real-world application, driving impactful technologies that shape the future of engineering and innovation.
A new era in manufacturing is emerging as the industry evolves from traditional automation to intelligent, autonomous operations - further guided by human-in-the-loop expert systems. This transformation is accelerating the journey from concept to market-ready product by leveraging the power of integrated digital technologies.
At the heart of the smart factory lies the digital twin—a comprehensive virtual replica of the physical world, encompassing everything from raw materials to finished goods. These digital twins serve as dynamic sandboxes, enabling companies to simulate, test, and refine processes before and during deployment. Continuously updated by real-time sensor data, they offer an unparalleled view into the health and performance of the entire manufacturing ecosystem.
When digital twins are combined with machine learning and connected to real-time control systems, the factory evolves into a self-optimizing entity. Data flows seamlessly from machines to models, generating predictive insights that prevent failures, reduce waste, and enhance efficiency.
This is not a vision of the distant future—it’s happening now. Through compelling case studies, we’ll explore how these technologies are already reshaping modern industry.
Crucially, we also examine the role of human expertise in guiding the context and application of these tools. Far from replacing people, autonomous systems amplify human intelligence, enabling more informed decisions and unlocking new levels of innovation.
Innovation and Transformation Director, Bouygues Group
Vincent Maret is the Innovation and Transformation Director at Bouygues Group. He has been instrumental in driving competitiveness through innovation within the company, focusing on agile methods and fostering open innovation programs. His role involves supporting various business units in their transformation efforts. Maret has extensive experience in marketing, strategy, innovation, project management, and telecommunications. He previously served as the Marketing Manager and deputy R&D director at Bouygues Telecom and worked as a Project Executive with IBM Global Services. He also founded and led the US Office of Bouygues Telecom in Silicon Valley, which has since been renamed winnovation, serving the entire Bouygues Group.
R&D Innovation Project Manager, Bouygues Construction
Jérôme is passionate about digital design technologies and innovation in construction. With a solid background in both design and execution, he has led BIM strategies and managed multidisciplinary teams on major projects across France. Currently, R&D Innovation Project Manager at Bouygues Construction, he focuses on digital twins, digital shadows, and immersive technologies like Nvidia Omniverse.
Jérôme aims to drive digital transformation by bridging R&D, Innovation, field operations, and collaborative workflows.
During this fireside chat, Jérôme will share his vision for applying digital twins in the construction industry and highlight the opportunities enabled by NVIDIA Omniverse.
Assistant Professor of AI and Decision-Making, MIT Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Sara Beery is an Assistant Professor in MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), within the Faculty of AI and Decision Making and CSAIL. She was previously a visiting researcher at Google, where she worked on Auto Arborist. Deeply passionate about the natural world, she is driven by the growing need for technology-based solutions to pressing conservation and sustainability challenges.
Her research centers on developing computer vision methods to enable global-scale environmental and biodiversity monitoring across diverse data modalities. She tackles complex, real-world challenges such as strong spatiotemporal correlations that cause domain shift, imperfect data quality, fine-grained categories, and long-tailed distributions.
Beery received her PhD in Computing and Mathematical Sciences (CMS) from Caltech, advised by Pietro Perona, and was awarded the Amori Doctoral Prize for her dissertation. Her work has been recognized with numerous honors, including an AI2050 Early Career Fellowship, an NSF CAREER Grant, a PIMCO Data Science Fellowship, an Amazon AI4Science Fellowship, and the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship. Her research has been supported by the NSF, NASA, Google, Microsoft, IBM, the U.S. Air Force, MIT J-WAFS, and the Caltech Resnick Sustainability Institute.
Natural world images collected by communities of enthusiast volunteers provide a vast and largely uncurated source of data. As an example, iNaturalist has enabled the collection of over 250 million images that are taxonomically identified by their community and then contributed to GBIF as species occurrence records. But these images contain a wealth of "secondary data" that gets lost when we label images with species alone, including crucial insights into interactions, animal social behavior, morphology, habitat, and co-occurrence. The analysis needed to surface valuable scientific insight beyond species is currently costly, time-consuming, and expert-dependent. We propose interactive, open-ended image retrieval as a mechanism to support scientific discovery in these collections, and introduce INQUIRE, a novel text-to-image retrieval benchmark built to provide a rigorous evaluation that challenges models to demonstrate advanced knowledge and visual reasoning on expert, scientifically impactful retrieval tasks. We demonstrate several case studies exploring the use of our tool to rapidly test ecological hypotheses, and discuss the need for innovation in statistical techniques to understand uncertainty in retrieval-derived trends.
Professor of Computational Physics, Arts et Metiers Institute of Technology
Francisco Chinesta is a full at Arts et Metiers Institute of Technology (Paris, France), Honorary Fellow of the “Institut Universitaire de France” and Fellow of the Spanish Royal Academy of Engineering. He led several chairs, among them the ones of AIRBUS, ESI, KEYSIGHT, SKF, and RTE. He received many scientific awards (IACM Fellow award, IACM Zienkiewicz medal, ESAFORM award, …). He is president of the French Association of Mechanics and director of the CNRS research group I-GAIA on hybrid artificial intelligence. He received many distinctions: the Academic Palms, the French Order of Merit, the Doctorate Honoris Causa at the University of Zaragoza, and, in 2019, the silver medal from the CNRS. He is the director of the DESCARTES programme on Hybrid AI that the CNRS develops in its hub at Singapore (CNRS@CREATE).
Intelligent modeling technologies, such as digital twins, can enhance community-centric urban planning by simulating environments and generating predictive scenarios in response to critical or uncertain situations. This enables optimal planning as well as supported, or even automated, real-time decision-making.
BIM & Digital Construction Director, Colas
Maud Guizol, a graduate of ESTP Paris, began her career at Bouygues Construction before joining Colas. She spent 14 years in the Indian Ocean as a Structural Engineer and, in 2014, founded BIMbyCO, Colas’ BIM team, leading an international network and developing processes, tools, and training. Back in Paris since 2020, she expanded BIM deployment across the Group and, since 2022, has served as Director of BIM & Digital Construction, driving BIM adoption and leading the territorial digital twin platform 2IN.
Colas has advanced its use of BIM into a true territorial digital twin with 2IN, a mapping platform that integrates business and open data to improve project and asset management. This simple, accessible solution enhances operational performance, strengthens decision-making, and actively supports the ecological transition of our territories.
Nvidia SEMEA Omniverse & Digital Twins Sales Specialist, NVIDIA
Head of Innovation, Dassault Systèmes
President and Co-Founder, Iconem
Jewan John Bae comes to MIT Corporate Relations with more than 20 years of experience in the specialty chemicals and construction industries. He facilitates fruitful relationships between MIT and the industry, engaging with executive level managers to understand their business challenges and match them with resources within the MIT innovation ecosystem to help meet their business objectives.
Bae’s areas of expertise include new product commercialization stage gate process, portfolio management & resource planning, and strategic planning. He has held various business leadership positions at W.R. Grace & Co., the manufacturer of high-performance specialty chemicals and materials, including Director of Strategic Planning & Process, Director of Sales in the Americas, and Global Strategic Marketing Director. Bae is a recipient of the US Army Commendation Medal in 1986.