WRc Waste Doctors raising funds for Reuse Network through their RWM24 Pledge Book
Published on: 11 Sep 2024
Read moreDAY 1: Be brave and challenge yourself!
On Monday afternoon, some 3,000 festival goers from 32 countries descended on Newcastle Racecourse for Northumbrian Water’s eighth Innovation Festival
The festival leapt into action with a warm welcome from Heidi Mottram, Northumbrian Water’s CEO and Nigel Watson Chief Information Officer who then interviewed Paralympian swimmer Ellie Simmonds who compared the challenge of preparing and competing in her swimming competitions with those ahead of all the attendees at the festival.
Over at the River Deep Mountain AI sprint (RDMAI), Angela MacOscar, head of innovation at Northumbrian Water, dropped in to encourage the attendees to “make the project move” and not hold back on ideas, all ideas even “crazy” ideas…bring them all to the table, she said and “Don’t hold back!”
For the next three hours, minds were focused on the challenges, opportunities and gaps of one of the biggest projects of the moment: how to address water quality challenges using AI.
Our nation's waters are a priceless resource, but pollution from human activities has markedly changed the health of these living ecosystems.
- Only 14% of England’s rivers hold good ecological status.
- Three quarters of our rivers pose a serious risk to human health.
- Pollution comes from a variety of sources including agriculture, industry, sewage, and road run-off.
The RDMAI sprint team – made up of experts from Cognizant, Xylem and WRc – hold a hypothesis which states that though collation of a wide range of existing datasets using AI, they will be able to generate systemic insights on several aspects of a catchment. This will provide critical context to stakeholders enabling them to take collective actions across catchments to improve the catchment’s health.
The RDMAI team has funding for the next 18 months to explore, test and put their hypothesis into practice. But they need help to discover the best way to harness the power of AI, which is where the sprint go-ers’ expertise and enthusiasm comes into its own.
Over the 3.5 days of the festival, sprinters will help the team understand the complex challenges facing catchment management, and what it takes to enable action and co-create solutions. This sprint will be a catalyst for merging human needs and cutting-edge data science technologies. It will provide fast-paced answers and it will focus on what we already have (rather than going out and looking for new answers), and it will define and discover four use cases to identify eight catchments.
Today we tested our understanding of AI; tomorrow we develop that understanding further and define the water body problem that needs to be fixed; on Wednesday we will endeavour to generate ideas to solve the problem using AI; and on Thursday we will develop and build a prototype and practice our pitch before presenting it to the sprint jury.