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Exeter Team and NWG Hackathon
Exeter Team Presents an AI Solution in the Northumbrian Water Hackathon
A team of six, led by Prof. Guangtao Fu, participated in the ‘Every Second Counts’ Hackathon of the NWG Innovation Festival, held during 8-12th July 2019 in Newcastle, UK.
The Hackathon, which aimed at using cutting edge technologies to minimise interruptions to water supply, was one of three data hacks in the Innovation Festival organised by the Northumbrian Water Group. The Exeter team was the only team that presented an Artificial Intelligence solution. The solution is an integration of three cutting edge technologies that enables early detection of interruption in water supply by Auto Encoder, localisation of the incident area by DenseNet, and automatic generation of valve closure plan to isolate the area for repair work.
“I was really intrigued with the approach you took and very impressed with the hydraulic modelling work!” said Michael Hull, the hack organiser at the NWG. Part of the methodology was reported in a journal paper entitled Deep learning identifies accurate burst locations in water distribution networks, published in Water Research.
The Exeter team was led by Prof. Guangtao Fu and consisted of Dr. Fanlin Meng (research fellow), Xiao Zhou (visiting PhD student from Tongji University, China), Prof. Wei Xu (visiting scholar from Chongqing Jiaotong University, China), Kaichun Liu (Msc student), and Robin Matzner (Undergraduate student).
Date: 24 September 2019