MsRI-EC- Develop a Research Infrastructure for Intelligent Water Systems

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The nation’s water utilities collect and store massive amounts of data to ensure reliable and efficient services. Yet, only about 10% of this information is used due to a lack of data sharing as well as limited staff resources and skills. This makes it impossible to apply Big Data tools that have revolutionized other sectors such as energy and transportation. This gap in the national infrastructure provides an opportunity to harness data science to provide real-time prediction, data-driven decision making, and system level optimization. As the nation’s water infrastructure is fragmented amongst many water utilities, there is a need for federal support to jump start the Big Data revolution for drinking water. This workshop will engage stakeholders and lay out a pathway to build a national research cyber infrastructure for intelligent water systems. This will include an online repository platform for storing, sharing, and analyzing data, as well as workforce development for all stakeholders across the water utilization cycle. The workshop will gather a broad range of stakeholders to ensure the cyber infrastructure, once implemented, will be valuable for an array of public and private institutions, and will impact national economic competitiveness and health.This Mid-scale Research Infrastructure Engineering Conference is a first step towards building the nation’s first interoperable cyber infrastructure for intelligent water systems. Workshop participants will identify the needs of the nation’s digital water infrastructure, lay out a pathway to design and implement the infrastructure, organize a highly qualified team to develop a project proposal, and identify best practices for management of mid-scale infrastructure. The conference will gather a broad range of stakeholders and ensure that the proposed cyber infrastructure provides value to private and public institutions. The proposed platform will be developed for sharing data, analytics tools, and workforce development for all stakeholders across the water utilization cycle. With proper design and implementation, the vast empirical data currently being collected by utilities can be converted into tools incorporating machine learning and artificial intelligence to allow a new generation of water professionals to harness data for not only daily operations but continued technology innovation, optimization, and cost reduction. The conference will result in a report with recommendations specific to the nation’s first interoperable cyber infrastructure for intelligent water systems that address critical execution issues around cyber security, data access, data management, and intellectual property.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.