
People

Lab Director
Dr Eva Agapaki
Dr Agapaki is an Artificial Intelligence Assistant Professor in the M.E. Rinker, Sr. School of Construction Management. She brings 7 years of academic and industry experiences in data analytics, AI applications in civil engineering, infrastructure computer vision, Digital Twinning and automation in construction. She recently obtained her PhD from the University of Cambridge, where her research pioneered the automated generation of geometric Digital Twins of existing industrial facilities from Lidar data at a commercially viable level. She conducted part of her PhD research at MIT and was awarded the U.S. National Academy of Engineering grant for addressing one of the 14 Grand Challenges in Engineering of our century. She also holds an MSc in Geotechnical Earthquake Engineering from UCLA and a BSc in Civil Engineering from the University of Patras in Greece. She has extensive industry experience working as Innovation Lead at PTC Boston, where she led innovation projects on computer vision and deep learning applications in the manufacturing industry, and AVEVA, where she advises the AI team on machine learning methods for complex data (3D point cloud processing methods). Outside the lab, she practices yoga and enjoys walking in nature with her dog.

PhD Students
Obinna Chimezie Madubuike
Obinna Chimezie Madubuike is a fourth-year Ph.D. Candidate at the Rinker School of Construction Management. He completed his undergraduate and master’s studies at the University of Lagos, Nigeria where he studied Quantity Surveying for both degrees. His current research work is focused on the use of Digital Twin to improve healthcare facilities management. This work focuses on using a Digital Twin platform to monitor and control systems and equipment within a healthcare facility as means of enabling preventive maintenance measures. Obinna is co-advised by Professor Anumba and Professor Agapaki. Obinna’s hobbies are singing and playing soccer.
Graduate Students

Maria J. Gonzalez Stefanelli
Maria is pursuing her Master’s degree in Building Construction at the University of Florida. She received her B.A. in Architecture from the University of Central Florida in 2020 and graduated with honors. Her upbringing includes a passion for the 3D world, design, and construction. She began to work in the construction industry in 2018, and her work is devoted to the representation of the real world with the digital one. Her research focuses on geometric digital twins and in particular, the automated class segmentation of laser scanned industrial facilities with the aim to reduce manual annotation. In her free time, she enjoys spending time with her family and spending time outdoors.

Avi Jain
Avi is pursuing her Master’s degree in Computer Science at the University of Florida. She received her B.Tech in Computer Science from the K.J. Somaiya College of Engineering in 2021. She was a Production Engineering Fellow at the Major League Hacking sponsored by Facebook in 2021. Her research focuses on geometric digital twins and in particular, the automated class segmentation of laser scanned industrial facilities with the aim to improve segmentation accuracy.

Sandeep Jalui
Sandeep is pursuing his Master’s degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Florida. He received his BSc. in Electronics and Telecommunications Engineering from the Rajiv Gandhi Institute of Technology in 2018. He worked as a Machine Learning Engineer in the manufacturing, education and financial sectors in India. His research focuses on instance and panoptic segmentation.

Sameer Mohata
Sameer is a master’s student of Construction Management in the Digital Twins Lab at the University of Florida. He obtained his bachelor’s degree in Civil Engineering in 2018 from University of Pune, India. After his graduation, he worked as a Field Engineer for about 2 years on construction of industrial chemical manufacturing projects. Sameer’s research interests lie in understanding technological gaps in manual bridge inspection and current needs of bridge inspectors to design a successful interactive human-centered Augmented-reality based system for Visual Bridge Inspection. He is currently investigating the ambiguities of Inspection Standards and assessing the usefulness and readiness of existing systems to serve as guidelines for designing an Augmented reality-based inspection system. In his free time, Sameer likes to read “manga” and play volleyball.
Support Staff

Pavlito
Pavlito is supporting the lab in social events and gatherings!