People and Research

Creator of the first digital holographic(spatial) display comic (holo-comic). Interactive visual artist and founder of Valholo, an XR and spatial display studio. Jake Adams holds an MS in Design and Digital Media from the University of Edinburgh and a BFA in painting from the Maryland Institute College of Art. Emanating from a fine arts background, his visual skills, coupled with programming and asset production, have allowed him to become a versatile artist and educator. His studio creates holographic content for the Looking Glass Factory and 3D/2D assets on the Polygon network. Jake Adams specializes in mixed media arts, Asset production for emerging technology, ethical AI, and interactive visual narrative with a focus on making the intangible more tangible.

Jake Adams’ current focus as it pertains to digital twins manifests through the concept of 幽玄 (Yūgen). Yūgen speaks to the indescribable depth where the visible hints at the invisible. It’s a feeling that emerges from the seen, yet points toward the unseen—perfectly blending the tangible and intangible. Through this philosophy, Adams has designed and developed software to create a digital twin based on his physical outputs on canvas. By way of varying inputs captured via computer vision in his art studio, he is also experimenting with Gaussian splat methods to refine visual representation accuracy as an object(the canvas) changes in real-time.

Fawad Ahmad is an assistant professor in the Computer Science Department at the Rochester Institute of Technology. His research focuses on building live 3D digital twins that reflect the physical world with high-fidelity. In addition, he also builds cyber-physical systems that leverage digital twins to enable end-to-end application benefits e.g., safer and more reliable autonomous driving. Dr. Ahmad’s research fuses data from multiple sensors (e.g., LiDARs and cameras) in real-time.

In recent work, Dr. Ahmad built a live 3D digital twin of a traffic intersection by using LiDAR point clouds from vehicles and roadside mounted LiDARs, in real-time. He showed the benefits of this capability by deploying this capability on real-world vehicles and roads. In another project, he built a crowdsourced parking analytics system. Core to this system is a digital twin of public parking spaces, updated in real-time.

Dr. Anselm is the Director of the Center for Electronics Manufacturing and Assembly (CEMA) at RIT.  Dr. Anselm's Industrial experience includes twelve years of electronics failure analysis and root cause analysis. He also managed the Universal Instruments’ AREA Consortium which conducted research in assembly materials, process and reliability of electronic packaging. Dr. Anselm served on the Board of Directors for the Surface Mount Technology Association (SMTA) from 2013-2019.

Using Digital Twins to Revolutionize the Surface Mount Technology (SMT) Stencil Printing Training Process 

Dr. Anselm and his collaborators aim to create a stencil printing digital twin education platform for the industry, addressing a gap in current educational resources.  In SMT digital twins, a human-machine interface (HMI) within a digital twin is key in helping users explore, monitor, and interact with virtual models while providing relevant information, such as learning materials. In manufacturing training with digital twins, trainees come from various experience levels and technical backgrounds.  Dr. Anselm proposes personalizing the HMI in DT to save training time and assist users in using DT systems effectively. Additionally, the DT will integrate innovative 3D visualizations into the HMI that illustrate how existing AI methods predict the printed solder pastes and how the predictions are affected by variables in SMT, providing an overview of the predictions for making data-driven decisions.

Shaun is a Professor of 3D Digital Design at Rochester Institute of Technology, specializing in Unreal Engine, real-time technology, and immersive learning. With 20 years of experience in 3D graphics and interactive education, he has led award-winning projects in national and regional TV, VFX, advertising, and digital learning.

A Gold Level Unreal Authorized Instructor, Foster is dedicated to advancing real-time 3D workflows and Digital Twins, and Previz. He actively shares his expertise through his Unreal-focused YouTube channel, providing accessible training for students and professionals. His research and development efforts have been supported by numerous grants, including Epic MegaGrants for online learning and virtual production, XR-based medical training with NVIDIA and IBM-Notre Dame, and AI-driven virtual avatars.

As RIT’s 2023-25 Faculty Fellow on Generative AI, Foster is at the forefront of integrating AI, XR/VR, and emerging technologies into next-generation education. His work bridges disciplines, pushing the boundaries of interactive learning, historical preservation, and real-time visualization. Whether through VR reconstructions, AI-powered experiences, or Unreal Engine innovation, he is committed to shaping the future of interactive education and digital storytelling.

In the networking area we have a series of projects or classes that depend on digital twins. The first is network experimentation that uses the NSF FABRIC infrastructure. Experiments are first built in the “real world” and then duplicated on FABRIC. Current work includes machine learning for network troubleshooting, telemetry, multimodal data and DNS attacks.

These projects are actually the output of another project that seeks to discover a model by which students in a major can add data science and machine learning topics to their education. This is accomplished via small lectures, topic research and project-based learning with regular assessments. This work is supported by RC and GCCIS Seed grants and PLIG. External funding is pending. Learn more

Additionally, the ISchool has a pair of courses (Network Design and Large Scale Networking) which have a growing connection as the first creates a digital network and the second implements this topology with actual equipment.

Gary has over two decades of experience spanning education, entertainment, and architectural visualization. He has designed for Disney, the San Francisco Opera, and SUNY institutions, and co-founded Jacobs Illustration, LLC. His interdisciplinary research focuses on XR storytelling, digital design pedagogy, and public engagement. An award-winning educator and published scholar, Gary bridges academia, professional practice, and community service to shape the future of design and immersive media.

He holds a BFA from the University of Northern Colorado and an MFA from Pennsylvania State University, and is currently an Associate Professor in, and Program Director of, the 3D Digital Design program within the School of Design.

Konstantinos leads research on location-based media, spatial computing, and augmented reality, with a current focus on user engagement, participatory design, and civic-scale AR experiences. His flagship project, Open3DMap, is a platform for real-time, GPS-anchored 3D mapping built from everyday smartphones. He explores how non-experts can collectively capture, govern, and reuse spatial data to support accessibility, education, urban planning, and immersive computing. He is especially interested in building open, composable alternatives for map infrastructure, grounded in community participation and open standards. Konstantinos is also developing new work on context-aware navigation and AI-driven spatial intelligence, using multimodal models to make physical environments searchable, interactive, and semantically enriched. Recent projects explore how techniques like Gaussian splatting, CLIP embeddings, and 3D semantic segmentation can make maps dynamic, meaningful, and human-centered.

Ji Hwan Park is an assistant professor in the School of Interactive Games and Media at the Golisano College of Computing and Information Sciences. His research focuses on analyzing and visualizing various types of data, ranging from 2D and 3D data to high-dimensional and biomedical sequence data. His research interests are accessible data visualization, digital twins, human-AI teaming, VR/AR, and crowdsourcing. His research has been published in IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, Transactions on Multimedia, Computer Graphics and Applications, and VIS, ACM CHI, etc.

Dr. Hanif Rahbari is an Associate Professor at the Golisano College of Computing and Information Sciences, and affiliated with the Kate Gleason College of Engineering and RIT’s ESL Global Cybersecurity Institute. His research focuses on wireless ecosystem security and communications, with emphasis on connected vehicle security, secure spectrum coexistence, and digital twins. Dr. Rahbari is a recipient of the NSF CAREER Award and a co-inventor on three U.S. patents. He has authored over 30 peer-reviewed publications and teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on cybersecurity and (wireless) networking across colleges.

Dr. Rahbari advances and utilizes digital twins to study and educate on secure connected vehicle technologies. His work includes building digital twins as testbeds to enable realistic yet practical evaluation of wireless interactions among vehicles on potentially adversarial roadways; developing multiplayer games enabled by digital twins to promote safe driving practices in smart transportation systems; and incorporating AI and humans-in-the-loop within digital twins to explore how connected vehicle technologies influence human decision-making or future AI-driven autonomous vehicles. He employs wireless ray-tracing tools, game engines, hardware radios, and adversarial modeling to construct realistic digital twins. This research supports the safe and secure integration of connected vehicle technologies, contributing to the safety of future roadways, and the integration of digital twins in hands-on courses at RIT.

David I. Schwartz, Ph.D. (he/him/his) has worked in the academic field of game design and development since 2001, when he founded the Game Design Initiative at Cornell University. In 2007, Schwartz moved to the Rochester Institute of Technology as a game design and development faculty member who formed the School of Interactive Games and Media (IGM) in 2011. After receiving tenure in 2011, he became IGM's Director in 2015. His current research focuses on cybersecurity gamification, critical infrastructure, geogames, digital twins, and physically-based animation.

Brian Tomaszewski, Ph.D. is a Geographic Information Scientist specializing in geographic visualization and the use of digital twins in teaching and research. His work spans GIS and spatial data science, with applications in disaster management and forced displacement. He has published over 60 peer-reviewed papers and is the author of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) for Disaster Management (Routledge). Dr. Tomaszewski has led internationally funded research in countries including Germany, Jordan, and Rwanda, and is a recipient of a Fulbright Scholarship. He also shares geospatial teaching resources through his YouTube channel, which supports learners around the world.

Teaching Students to Build Digital Twins with the Help of Video Game Engines

Creating a Digital Twin with 3D Geospatial Data, ArcGIS Pro, and Python

Dr. Linwei Wang is the Bruce E Bates Professor of Computing and Information Sciences at RIT,, where she serves as the Director of the Personalized Healthcare Technology (PHT180) Research Center that consists of over 130 faculty affiliates across nine colleges at RIT. Dr. Wang directs the Computational Biomedical Lab at RIT, with core research interests centered around statistical inference, Bayesian deep learning, and inverse problems, with applications to signal and image analysis in a variety of domains including healthcare, astrophysics, and material design. Dr. Wang is a recipient of the NSF CAREER Award in 2014 and the United States Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) in 2019.  Dr. Wang is a currently member and the Executive Secretary on the Board of Directors for the International Society of Medical Image Computing and Computer-Assisted Intervention (MICCAI). 

An important research direction in Dr. Wang’s lab addresses the challenges towards the ultimate goal of predictive twinning in the healthcare domain: to establish AI foundations that enables rapid and continual adaptation of a DT with live data from a person, and hybridizes physics-based and data-driven modeling to improve the interpretability and trustworthiness of a DT. Dr. Wang’s group applies these AI foundations to building DTs of various organs such as the heart and lung of an individual.