Mr. Vartan Piroumian

The mainstream message about the promise of digital twins focuses on modeling and simulation. The marketing literature and graphics show fancy images of graphical representations produced by sophisticated modeling and simulation software or engineering analysis tools. The mainstream message is that digital twins can help accelerate product time to market while simultaneously lowering the costs thereof by supplanting real-world engineering involving physical models and prototypes with software-oriented design.

While these claims are not entirely unfounded, this talk presents an entirely different view: the true promise of digital twins is in its potential to advance interoperability across computing applications, domains, industries, and vertical markets. Interoperability will cultivate greater efficiency and reduced risk and enable information and knowledge reuse—the real means to greater capability of our systems. Making digital twins work will require consensus on what digital twins are, how they represent data, information, and knowledge, and how they foster sharing and interoperability.

Biography:

Vartan Piroumian is an enterprise architect and global technology consultant to some of the world’s largest corporations. He counsels and advises at all echelons, from the C-level to the technical, on a broad range of technology topics in computer software and systems. His formal training is in computer science and electrical engineering. He holds the industry-standard TOGAF-9 certification in enterprise architecture, and previously held a DO-178C certification for real-time systems architecture and engineering.

Prior to his foray into enterprise architecture, Mr. Piroumian worked as a software engineer in a wide range of industries, at all levels of the software stack from OS internals to the applications. Some of his software engineering highlights are the authoring of inertial and celestial navigation software for the US NASA Space Shuttle, creation of software developer tool suites for several Unix variants, and the development of libraries and services for the Java Developer’s Kit (JDK).

He is the author of two award-winning books on Java software platform technologies, a contributing author to a book on digital twins entitled “The Digital Twin,” as well the author of several articles in IEEE publications, including two articles on digital twins published in IEEE Computer magazine in the past few years.

Mr. Piroumian is recognized as a world authority on digital twin technology. During the past several years he has been an invited speaker and presenter at several international conferences focusing on digital twins, the Internet of Things (IoT), RFID, and other related technologies. Mr. Piroumian is a member of the IEEE Computer Society and the Reliability Society.