The Persona Intelligence & Social Digital Twin Lab

The Persona Intelligence & Social Digital Twin Lab is a research and innovation lab within the Information Technology Solutions Center dedicated to advancing persona-driven intelligence. 

The lab explores how intelligent persona generation, evaluation, and integration can bridge the interaction gap between users and the goal-oriented outputs of information technology solutions. 

What is Persona?

We define persona as a construct that originates as a structured representation of human identity, beliefs, values, and worldviews, evolves into a reasoning variable that frames and structures human intent, and ultimately activates as a unit of intelligent agency that shape system behavior and operationalizes human needs within intelligent information solutions.

Research Areas

How personas are built — data, structure, generation.

How we know a persona represents reality and works as intended demographics: benchmarks, authenticity, consistency.

Understanding how personas function within AI agents, including reasoning, memory, self-improvement, and multi-agent collaboration. This is where persona intelligence directly interacts with agentic systems.

Understanding the interaction of AI personas with humans, robots, communities, policy, digital twins.

Ethics, consent, fairness, safety, governance of Persona Development.

Industry & Nonprofit Partners

We provide persona research services including:

  • Simulacra Platforms for Persona research, persona generation, and Persona Augmentation
  • Persona Design and Refinement for Agentic AI
  • Persona Intelligence and Fidelity Improvement
  • Speculative Policy Research Sandbox
  • Integration of Personas in IT Solutions

Lab Members

Headshot of Hazem Said

Hazem Said

Professor (F2), CECH - School of Information Technology

250C Teachers College

Academic faculty and leader with over 20 years of experience in teaching, academic leadership, and translating best practices into impactful solutions. Passionate about helping people; recognized for visionary leadership, strategic and results-oriented approach, ability to take innovative ideas to fruition, ability to listen to various constituencies, ability to foster transformative growth, innovation and entrepreneurship. 
Full Profile
Headshot of Amir Asadi

Amir Asadi

Graduate Assistant, CECH - School of Information Technology

PhD Candidate in IT focusing on on socio-technical AI systems, Persona Intelligence, and digital twins.  My research explores how large language models can simulate and reason about human behavior to support user research, system design, and decision-making. I also work with emerging technologies such as AI, AR, and VR to build human-centered, impactful systems.
Full Profile

Publications

1. Asadi, A. R., & Said, H. (2026). Design space of interactive persona systems: A systematic literature review of the evolution of personas in the age of generative AI. Issues in Informing Science and Information Technology, 23, 6. https://doi.org/10.28945/5812

2.   Asadi, A. R., Akinremi, T. P., Appiah, J. K., Jayathilake, H. M., Ibitoye, O., & Said, H. (2025). Bits, Bytes, and Bars: Towards a Digital Twin of the US Criminal Justice System. International Journal of Human–Computer Interaction, 41(19), 12050–12071. https://doi.org/10.1080/10447318.2025.2452201  

3.  Asadi, A.R., Zhang, Y. & Said, H. What do personas say about privacy & security: a systematic literature review through human-AI collaboration. J Ambient Intell Human Comput 16, 1175–1190 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12652-025-05007-w

4. Asadi, A. R. (2026). Building conversational information sources as human-centered digital persona twins for probation officer training. In Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Human Information Interaction and Retrieval (pp. 394–398). Association for Computing Machinery. https://doi.org/10.1145/3786304.3787936

Collaboration

 The lab welcomes the opportunity to collaborate with those interested can contact Amir Asadi.