WET News

wwtonline.co.uk | APRIL 2019 WET NEWS 7 HOW HARVI USES ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE PRINCIPLES The idea of artificial intelligence began to gain ground in the mid-20th century and, over the decades, the ability to process data, recognise patterns and identify solutions has developed significantly and now forms part of everyday life. For example, algorithms are routinely used to process internet use – taking into account data such as sites visited and which device and browser are being used – to form a demographic profile of the individual and provide targeted advertising or content recommendations. Banks, meanwhile, monitor everyday financial transactions to create a baseline for how the customer behaves and can then temporarily cancel their card if there are signs of potentially fraudulent activity, such as unusual shopping sprees or use in a foreign country. Perhaps the most striking use of AI to date came last year, when Google demonstrated that its Duplex chatbot technology could so convincingly mimic a human that it could call up a hairdresser and book an appointment without detection. "A lot of those technologies were built on this concept of hierarchical hidden Markov models," EMAGIN's Thouheed Gaffoor says. "Nuance Communications was one of the first companies to come up with the virtual assistant concept after studying how the human brain works, and a lot of its technology is what got baked into Siri. "If you look at how the human brain understands sentences, it's hierarchical. If the machine starts off by looking at a piece of paper with some messy handwriting, the first layer is: Can I interpret and understand each letter based on the handwriting? Then: Can I understand the words? Then: Can I understand the sentence? Then the last bit is: Do I understand the context of what the sentence is saying? "That's a hierarchy. That's how the human brain works and the concept that was abstracted behind a lot of machine learning models that made its way into Duplex." EMAGIN's HARVI platform follows many of the same principles, recognising patterns within the data, understanding the wider context and then – if necessary – suggesting a response. "We saw similarities with the water infrastructure in terms of plants – you have sensors that are generating parameter readings, these sensors are connected to assets, these assets have multiple parameters that are being measured, you have multiple assets connected to each other to form a process, and you have multiple processes in a plant," Gaffoor says. "A system is more than the sum of the assets, just as a sentence is more than the sum of the words. It's the context that's key. We saw the analogy and were able to capture that and bring it to the sector, and that's something that nobody has ever done." Black & Veatch's Mark Kaney adds: "It's opportune when you look at the UK water sector and the narratives coming out of Ofwat about no longer thinking about assets and starting to think about asset systems, especially in relation to sustainability, resilience and reliability. "A system can't just be a bunch of assets because that doesn't consider how they behave differently when you connect them together. This approach faces that challenge head on – it's not just looking at everything in isolation, putting it all in a bag and then saying: 'When you tot that all up, it means this'. It treats a system as a true asset life cycle system." "This technology came into a new operating model – they created the wholesale technology division because they knew they wanted to go down this route. "They recognised that the business needed to act and behave differently, and be organised slightly differently, to get the maximum value, so they laid the groundwork first." EMAGIN has since deployed HARVI at Scottish Water, too, and Heath says more and more companies are now starting to look at AI techniques. "It's like the way Excel spreadsheets came through the industry about 25 years ago – a few departments started using them and finding the benefit and then it expanded into other areas as people started to realise that it makes a lot of sense," he says. "I would expect that, in the next two or three years, we will see every water company in the UK using some form of AI in some form of their processing. My suspicion is that in five years or so, that will become the norm. It's been remarkably quick in the uptake and I know the companies that have been experimenting with it have been very impressed with the results they're getting." l SES Water's Jeremy Heath will be discussing innovative techniques to manage asset health at the WWT Asset Management conference in Birmingham on 2 May. 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