A human professor and his digital twin, always available for students

The University of Bologna and the University of Insubria have collaborated to develop the first digital twin of Professor Davide Tosi, who teaches Big Data and serves as the Rector’s Delegate for Artificial Intelligence at Insubria. The avatar was created by Tosi himself in collaboration with Professor Gustavo Marfia from the Department of the Arts at the University of Bologna and a team of researchers and thesis students at the VARLab.

The result is a digital replica of Professor Tosi - an avatar that faithfully reproduces his appearance, gestures, and even his voice, which is generated using advanced speech synthesis. The avatar is powered by a generative AI system optimized by Tosi and his team, and trained specifically on the topics covered in his Big Data course. This allows the digital twin to support students at any time by answering questions and clarifying concepts related to the subjects taught in class.

For example, the avatar can respond to questions such as: What is artificial intelligence? And: What are big data?

Here’s how it might answer: “Artificial intelligence refers to the ability of machines to learn and imitate human reasoning through extensive training. It can be applied across many fields—from gaming to healthcare and finance—helping improve both efficiency and the quality of outcomes.” “Big data, on the other hand, are large and complex sets of data generated from vast amounts of information. They are collected and processed efficiently to support analysis, forecasting, and productivity improvements, even though they can often be very challenging to manage.”