An Interview with Myrna Bittner, Founder & CEO, RUNWITHIT Synthetics

Myrna Bittner is the CEO and Co-Founder of RWI Synthetics, an Artificial Intelligence modelling company that creates Single Synthetic Environments – live, geospatially accurate cities or regions, complete with their people, activity, policies, technologies, development, and infrastructure to calculate the impacts of all kinds of technologies existing and anticipated under any conceivable scenarios.

In other words, digitally model and optimize all of the “what ifs” of the future before trying to build or change it. Their models are particularly valuable for decision makers facing disrupted, unprecedented futures and include mobility, energy, resilience, sustainability, public health, equity and economic impact calculations.

An example of RWI’s work came in 2020, when the company was selected as 1 of 10 international companies for the Incubatenergy® Labs Challenge, creating a proof of concept of a dual-disaster for a Phoenix-based utility, Salt River Projects and the Electric Power Research Institute.

RWI was tasked with creating a Single Synthetic Environment (SSE), a living digital model of 18,000 households and over 2000 businesses residing in 15 square miles of the Phoenix/Tempe region. In this SSE, RWI ran scenarios to characterize the impacts of COVID-19 and outages on the utility’s customers in the near and long term, measuring the impact of different investments under consideration.