Meet the tech CEO who survived a flood and built a digital twin of Earth

 Ahmad Wani, co-founder and CEO of One Concern, was pursuing a master's degree in civil and environmental engineering at Stanford with a focus on earthquake engineering prior to creating a digital twin of the Earth.

The CEO encountered the very real threats posed by our physical Earth while returning home to Kashmir, in Northern India: The devastating 2014 floods that swept through India and Pakistan, destroying more than 2500 villages in the two nations.

Wani tells Verdict, "My family and I were forced to live on our roof for almost seven days as floodwaters destroyed our community." Nearly 85% of the region was submerged, resulting in numerous deaths and the loss of loved ones.

This prompted me to consider disaster preparedness, Pakistan power market ultimately, climate change, which is the root cause of many of these calamities, more deeply.

“When I got back to Stanford, I started working with a number of professors and colleagues in AI-focused research to improve models that could better predict a number of climate-related disasters. In the end, this turned into our proof of concept, which was used to launch One Concern in 2015."

Since its inception, One Concern, based in Menlo Park, California, has raised more than $119 million in funding. GlobalData predicts that the company will be one of the next AI unicorns. Its product is a digital Earth twin that simulates how communities and their surrounding natural and built environments are affected by natural disasters.

GlobalData says that digital twins are a growing trend in technology and are already being used in power, healthcare, and rail. Digital twins are real-time representations of physical assets, systems, or processes that can be built using AI, mixed-reality, or a combination of the two. They represent the next generation of business information modelling (BIM).

With Nvidia and Blackshark announcing work on their own digital versions of our planet in November, it appears that creating a digital twin of Earth is becoming increasingly popular. However, One Concern's creation is in line with the European Commission's Destination Earth (DestinE) plan, whereas these endeavors may fall more under the entertainment/social and metaverse categories.

The DestinE twin, which is currently under construction, will model everything from climate change and weather forecasting to food and water security, global ocean circulation, and even ocean biogeochemistry.

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Wani however accepts One Concern will go "above and beyond" with its advanced twin of Earth.

According to what he tells Verdict, "Our digital twin takes into account the vast range of underlying interconnected networks of business-critical infrastructure" in order to comprehend how the initial effects of a disaster might spread to cause a cascade of subsequent effects that will exacerbate and extend recovery.

The "vast amounts of interconnected networks that comprise the foundation of our infrastructure and societies" that Wani believes are being ignored in climate discussions are referred to as infrastructure in this context. Other examples of infrastructure include substations, power lines, seaports, buildings, bridges, and highways.