In June 2022, a successful International Symposium titled “Resilience in the Built Environment” was held in Cuenca, Ecuador, as part of a memorandum of understanding signed between the University of Florida (UF) and Universidad de Cuenca (U. Cuenca). This symposium was a significant milestone–it marked the first meeting between research groups from both institutions: SHARE-Lab and FIBER at UF, and Virtualtec Llacta Lab and City Preservation Management at U. Cuenca. The symposium served as a platform for exchanging knowledge and experience on resilience in urban environments.
In February 2024, the 2nd Resilience Symposium was held at the University of Florida, again in partnership with U. Cuenca. The focus of this conference was to create a space for international discourse on the capacity of medium and small cities to address several sustainability challenges of the 21st century, most notably climate change. In its third rendition, Resilience Symposium 3 returned to Ecuador for a 2-day conference in June, focusing on data science and AI tools advancing resilience and disaster recovery in urban environments.
In November 2026, the Resilience Symposium returns for its 4th installment, bringing additional partners, the University of Stuttgart, and the Paris-based think tank, Urban AI. In alignment with these four universities’ and organizations’ growing research on digital twins, Resilience Symposium 4 is being reborn as Digital Twins for Resilience Urban Environments (DTRUE). The theme of the conference remains true to its origins–resilience as an essential concept in disaster risk management and sustainable development–but the particular focus this year will be on how digital twins can advance urban resilience. As in previous years, the conference will provide an opportunity for knowledge exchange among countries facing similar development challenges, including creating resilient and healthy urban environments, disaster risk reduction, environmental management, and community engagement to foster resilience.
Digital Twins (DTs) are AI-powered virtual replicas of physical systems that support real-time monitoring, predictive modeling, and scenario testing, enabling system-wide insight and informed decision-making. Urban Digital Twins (UDTs) focus on representing the built environment at the urban scale. They describe both physical objects (e.g., the built environment, vegetation, waterways, people) and abstract processes (e.g., pedestrian movement through the landscape, evacuation rates during extreme storms, home sales), by providing all relevant information and services through a unified interface. The purpose of UDTs is to enhance planning and management, thereby achieving more inclusive, safe, resilient, and sustainable urban environments. By integrating urban infrastructure, natural ecosystems, and socioeconomic dynamics, UDTs are positioned as transformative technologies that support disaster response and enhance climate resilience.
Incorporating these advanced technologies equips city planners and policymakers with powerful tools to meet the demands of urbanization, fostering innovation and collaboration across sectors. By leveraging the potential of AI and urban digital twins, we can transform cities into dynamic, strategic environments that anticipate and adapt to future challenges, ensuring they remain at the forefront of sustainable development for generations to come. This effort requires the support of cutting-edge research and innovation that universities can provide. In this context, the University of Florida (UF) and its Florida Digital Twin initiative are hosting the conference Digital Twins for Resilient Urban Environments.
Resilience has become a core concept in disaster risk management and sustainability science. Communities worldwide have developed strategies to create resilient and healthy urban environments. They have also implemented technological tools for environmental management and encouraged community participation to promote climate-neutral and resilient settings.
Just as the topic of the “built environment” focuses on designing and constructing better cities, enhancing “city resilience” is now recognized as a crucial need for urban communities, particularly in high-risk areas. While both natural and human-made disasters are tragic, the processes of post-disaster recovery and reconstruction offer unique opportunities for societies. These circumstances can help address fundamental issues and leverage local capacities collaboratively.
Within this framework, we invite researchers from the fields of urban planning, architecture, AI, data science, environmental modeling, environmental risk analysis, public health, and community resilience, as well as practitioners and students in these fields, to submit work that leverages digital twin technologies to build resilient cities for the two-day international conference, DTRUE. Conference proceedings will be peer reviewed by the scientific committee (see Tracks) and published. The Day 1 Video Session, in lieu of a traditional poster session, is also an excellent opportunity to showcase digital twin development in an engaging, impactful format.
Karla is a tenure-track Assistant Professor in the School of Architecture at the University of Florida and a faculty affiliate at the AI2 Center, the Center of Latin American Studies, and FIBER. She directs the AI in Architecture Graduate Certificate program and oversees the SHARE Lab, a research group focused on developing projects that leverage the interaction between artificial intelligence (AI) and human intelligence to enhance creativity in architectural design and to create tools to analyze big data on urban phenomena. At UF, Karla works with Digital Twins (DT), which she defines as intelligent environments, focusing on how this technology is applied across various scales—from buildings to city-wide infrastructure. She collaborates on international projects in Germany, Italy, Switzerland, Mexico, and Ecuador. Karla is an Ecuadorian architect and coder with a Master of Advanced Studies in Landscape Architecture and a Ph.D. in Technology in Architecture from ETH Zurich. Her Ph.D. research focused on integrating Artificial and Human Intelligence to deliver accurate, agile responses to natural disasters, using a multimodal fusion approach for machine learning inference.
Jeff is the director of the UF Florida Institute for Built Environment Resilience (FIBER). He is a registered architect and certified urban planner working at the interface of housing, neighborhoods, ecosystems, and hazards, with a focus on community-scale adaptation. He has led over 45 funded research projects totaling more than $14 million. His work has been recognized nationally with numerous awards in architecture, planning, and landscape architecture. His projects have been widely published and exhibited, including at the Venice Biennale. Jeff earned his bachelor’s degree in architecture from Washington University in St. Louis and master’s degrees in both architecture and city and regional planning from the University of California, Berkeley. While at Berkeley, he was awarded the Branner Fellowship to conduct a year-long research project studying the evolution of modernist neighborhood design in Europe, South America, and Asia—an experience that continues to shape his work today.
Changjie is a computational urbanist studying the spatial structure and functional dynamics of cities, with a focus on building scalable, intelligent urban digital twins for modeling, simulation, and decision-support planning. His work integrates geographic information systems (GIS), remote sensing, spatial econometrics, artificial intelligence (AI), and high-performance computing (HPC) to fuse large-scale, multi-sector urban data with real-time sensor streams into high-fidelity representations of cities across space and time. Leveraging cloud-based data infrastructures, 3D geospatial data, and smart city ontologies, he develops generative AI pipelines that rapidly reconstruct immersive cityscapes and agentic AI systems that autonomously reason about urban complexity, enabling scenario testing, agent-based experimentation, and the simulation of current and future urban conditions.
Hubert Beroche is the Founder and President of URBAN AI, an internationally renowned organization dedicated to Urban Artificial Intelligence. Since 2019, through ground studies, research, and development, he has coined and advanced the concept of Urban Artificial Intelligence and implemented it with global partners. He is also a Visiting Fellow at the Sorbonne Center for Artificial Intelligence, and the author of pioneering reports and books on urban AIs.
Daniel Orellana is a Professor at the University of Cuenca and a co-founder of LlactaLAB Sustainable Cities. His research, rooted in Geospatial Sciences, adopts a multidisciplinary approach to exploring the complex interactions between human societies and the environment. Specifically, his work focuses on urban sustainability analysis, mobility, and public spaces, leveraging his expertise in GIS and spatial analysis to understand people-environment dynamics.
Volker Coors studied computer science at the TU Darmstadt and received his doctorate in computer graphics. Since 2002, he has been Professor of Computer Science and Geo-Informatics at HFT Stuttgart. His research focuses on Urban Digital Twins, 3D geospatial data infrastructures, and the visualization of spatial data. From 2006-2017, he was Dean of Studies for the Information Logistics course; from 2019 to 2023, he was scientific director of the Institute for Applied Research. Since March 2023, he has been Vice President of Research and Digitalization at HFT Stuttgart. As a member of the Open Geospatial Consortium, Prof. Coors contributes his research results to standardization, for example, in the CityGML Standard Working Group (SWG). He is a founding member of the joint commission “3D City Modeling” of the German Society for Cartography e.V. and the German Society for Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Geoinformation e.V., and Vice-president of the Urban Data Management Society.
Founder and President of Urban AI, an internationally renowned organization dedicated to urban artificial intelligence. He collaborates with global partners to study, develop, and implement urban AIs. He is also an External Consultant at the OECD and a Visiting Fellow at the Sorbonne Center for Artificial Intelligence.
Is an urban theorist and urban storyteller with a background in architecture. Carl serves as the Assistant Director of the Florida Institute for Built Environment Resilience (FIBER)and Assistant Scholar at the School of Architecture at the University of Florida (UF). Brisotto holds a Ph.D. in Design, Construction, and Planning from UF and a Professional Architecture degree from the University IUAV of Venice. At the core of Carla’s research lies the intersection of urbanism and environmental narratives. Her research focuses on productive landscapes and climate change’s asymmetric impacts on population and their places through contemporary and historical lenses. Carla employs storytelling as a research method and works closely with communities within the Florida Resilient Cities Lab to understand the dynamics of spontaneous urban transformation. Currently, Carla is leading the international project “ReclaiMEDLand” funded by the Department of State of the United States of America, APS–Annual Program Statement 2023.