Next Lab at Smart Region Summit 2025
ASU Next Lab Co-founders Dr. Bea Rodriguez-Fransen and Dan Munnerley were featured as speakers at ASU’s Smart Region Summit on March 4, 2025. Rodriguez-Fransen served on a panel on Indigenous Communities and Social Impact, and Munnerley was a panelist for the Education and Workforce Development stream.
Indigenous Communities and Digital Twins: Capacity-Building, Digital Sovereignty & Ethics
This plenary session explored the use of digital twin technology among Indigenous communities. Participants learned how digital twins can facilitate community planning, resource management, job creation and cultural preservation, leading to sustainability of the planet. Panelists discussed issues around capacity-building, digital sovereignty, and ethical frameworks. Rodriguez-Fransen emphasized the importance of integrating the traditional ecological knowledges of Indigenous communities, such as weather monitoring systems that can help governments anticipate storms and other natural disasters. She shared a signal of change, the Alaska-based PolArctic project that merged Indigenous knowledge with advanced AI within a digital twin of the Arctic ocean to optimize fishery output and sustainability. She also emphasized being mindful of data equity and design justice. Aside from understanding that billions of people in the world are not connected to the internet, which means that their data sets are not included in current AI systems, data equity requires an understanding that the ways human beings collect, label, and categorize data may be biased. The goal, then, is to mitigate these biases when collecting and using data. Design justice ensures that Indigenous and marginalized peoples are included in the design process; and that designers anticipate the benefits and harms of the designed product or system, on humans, non-humans and the planet. The distinguished plenary session included:
- Christian Dandeneau, CEO and Co-Founder, iDFusion
Traci Morris, Executive Director, American Indian Policy Institute, ASU
Bea Rodriguez-Fransen, Co-Founder & Director, Next Lab, ASU - Moderated by: Trevor Reed, Professor, ASU College of Law, ASU
Education and Workforce Development
Next Lab Executive Director Dan Munnerley participated in the panel on Education and Workforce Development, which delved into the use of digital twin technology and AI to enhance education and workforce development. Participants explored how offline, privacy-centric AI such as EDge AI and digital twins can create immersive learning experiences, improve training outcomes, and better align educational programs with industry needs. Distinguished panelists included:
- John Baker, Founder & CEO, D2L
- Dan Munnerley, Founder and Executive Director of Next Lab, ASU
- Nicol Turner Lee, Senior Fellow, Center for Technology Innovation, The Brookings Institution
- Jim Van Voorhis, AI for the Public Sector, Glean
- Moderated by: Jeff Melanson, Unity & Lansberg Gersick Advisors
Continuing the Conversation
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