Northumbrian Water's Innovation Festival
This week Waterstons Innovation team go to NWG's amazing Innovation Festival. Adventures in Innovation #3.
Each year, Northumbrian Water host their Innovation Festival. Over the course of a week, people from all over the world come to the North East to collaborate and work together to solve the big challenges the sector faces. Through sprints and workshops and hacks, folks try to find fun and innovative solutions to problems.
Importantly though, it’s a lot of fun! It’s got the vibe of a summer music festival. There are pancakes, and beer, and I even saw a DJ with bongos at one point.
This week, the innovation team went to the Innovation Festival and took part in a sprint about smart water tanks and understanding how to reduce spills. In the end, we made a game!
What is this? We want to work out loud and share with you the work we do and the process we use to get there - whether we are successful or not. An important part of innovation, as we see it, is partnering and collaborating with other folks to achieve things you couldn’t do by yourself. Adventures in Innovation is our bi-weekly newsletter to document the journeys we go on to meet all these amazing people. We will go over the exciting things we have been up to, and give updates on our major projects.
Alex (Associate Director - Innovation & Leadership)
Northumbrian Water’s Innovation Festival is a marvellous thing, eh? If you haven’t been I’d so strongly recommend popping along to it next year, even just for a day. It’s a real insight into what is possible if you have a total commitment to the bit and a bunch of really brilliant people to pull it off. Definitely something to aspire to!
One of my highlights of the festival is a bit of a weird one but it took me right back to the roots of my career. Our hack for the week was a little simulation game which very, very simplistically modelled the operation of a storm tank - letting players decide when to turn pumps on and off to try to prevent spillages into rivers and waterways.
I spent the first six or seven years of my career as a game developer and it was so much fun to dredge some small amount of knowledge out of the depths of my brain for the past few days.
It is, however, a very specific part of the game-making process that I really enjoyed this week and, remarkably, it involves an Excel spreadsheet. Way back in the depths of time I worked on a game I won’t name for a company that will also remain nameless. The game was a recreation of the classic playground game assassin. Each player was given one other player that they needed to assassinate in a great big loop. Each time you killed your quarry you acquired their target as your own.
The owner of the studio, who was also the lead designer of the game, had a very complex scoring system for the game that both added and subtracted points for all sorts of different things but during playtesting we kept finding that one player would get an incredibly high score and everyone else’s score would be negative.
Cue me spending an entire day building a scoring model in a spreadsheet that ran a simulation of a full game a thousand times over showing average scores for all players. It modelled variance in player ability, the different scores for different types of kills, all the negative scores awarded for dying or making mistakes and everything we could possibly think of and it provided a way to very quickly change the point values for each.
We used a spreadsheet to balance an extremely complex game. This week I did the same again! I built a spreadsheet to model the water in the system and how players might play and we used it to balance the speeds of pumps and the sizes of tanks and I absolutely loved it
Andrew (Innovation Consultant)
This was my fourth year at the innovation festival. Last year, we made an AI model that detected rats. Well, since there were no rats available to train the AI on, we actually made an AI model that would detect if someone was wearing toy rat ears. Going into this year, we wanted to build something during the hack days that had that sort of chaotic energy. This year we built a game - Storm Drain Hero!
The challenge was about storm tanks, and what happens when they overflow into the environment. We decided to build a game that would realistically simulate the process based on data. This would let people better understand why spillages happen and give them a chance to see it’s a really difficult problem to try to solve. The game asks you to control a pump to make sure spillages don’t happen and balance that against the electricity costs of running the infrastructure.
Why would we want to make a game though? Apart from it being super fun (obviously), why is this a good way to approach the problem?
Building a full-scale digital-twin is a long-term, difficult, and expensive project. Starting small, with a simplified model and building on top of that is a good way to start. Aside from starting small, why not de-risk-ify it further? By making it a game, even if the full-scale digital-twin fails, you still have an amazing outreach tool. You could use it to get people into engineering, show the public the realities of what NWG have to go through, and take it to schools!
High-end digital twins make use of game engines. Yes, data will be crunched in Azure or Databricks (or the data platform of your choice), but the front-end interactive part can be made in game engines, or tools reminiscent of one.
In the end, we managed to pull it off and make the game work. In my experience, ending a hack day with something that works is an achievement in itself! However, we also won “best visualisation”, which I think is very well deserved
We are all really excited about the potential of continuing development of it. There are so many ways to make it a more fun game, but also develop the realism of the simulation behind it and the data we are feeding in.
Dani (Technology Consultant)
My Top 3 Innovation Fest 2023 Highlights
This year’s festival was a melting pot of brilliant minds and cutting-edge technology. From incredible startups transforming various industries to mind-blowing tech advancements, the event was a true showcase of the future.
Robot dogs!
You can’t beat a robot dog and people flocked to the 2 found wagging their mechanical tails at this year’s festival! They not only look the part and cost over £100k – they are also helping to revolutionise operational roles, being able to sustain harsher environments and support humans in dangerous situations.Storm Drain Hero!
During the Microsoft-sponsored hackathon focused on storm overflow, our team proudly emerged with the Best Visual Award for our innovative gamification approach to tackling storm overflow challenges and awareness! It was an exhilarating experience where creativity flourished, and I had the privilege to engage with highly knowledgeable individuals from both the water industry and Microsoft.Pancakes!
The Ultimate Life Fuel. Pancakes. Need I say more? Behold the photo.
yum.
Overall, it was a blast to witness the convergence of innovation, tech and creativity in one place, as well as unleashing that creativity ourselves in the hackathon!
Project Spotlight
🤖 AI Document Generation: writing documentation sucks: it’s boring and repetitive and not the most valuable use of your or your client’s time. Can we use modern AI models to speed up the process of writing draft documentation?
We have spent a lot of time trying to understand the best ways to deploy an AI model in a secure and responsible way. Handing confidential data to current models owned by large vendors has a risk associated with it - who owns the data after you submit it to the AI? What happens to your IP?
Typically, large AI models owned by folks like Microsoft will take your data and use it to retrain a future model. Effectively, this open-sources your data as users of future models will be given answers influenced by your data. There is another way though! By using open-source AI models, you can get around this. The benefit of using open-source in this instance is you can host it privately on your own servers, disconnected from Microsoft or OpenAI or Amazon.
There is another good reason to host models yourself too. ChatGPT is trained on all the internet - the good and the bad. Do you want your AI models that give you legal advice to have seen an episode of Better Call Saul? Do you want the AI that gives you financial advice to have watched Ocean’s Eleven and have read r/WallStreetBets? By using open-source models you have trained you can avoid this as you decide what data it is trained on.
So, a lot of our effort in AI right now is researching and testing systems like this. How can you deploy a model and ensure data privacy?
Roundup
We have a lot of exciting things happening in the Innovation team. We are problem agnostic problem solvers. Over the next few weeks, we will go deeper into each project - whether they are successful or not!
🦠 Mould Detection: We are looking to make Social Housing homes safer from mould and dampness by designing hardware and software to give early warning signs. We have recently learned about awaretag’s - which may provide an interesting solution to this!
🐕 Robot Dog: we are currently setting something up between a robotics lab and a client of ours. Can we use a robot dog to remove humans from dangerous environments?
👟 Sneaker Advert: We are tangentially involved with making an advert for a fashion company involving robots. Can robot arms make for a cool advert for a pair of shoes?
📔 Innovation Workshops: Our first workshop is now in the calendar! We are currently deep in research and planning for it!
📺 Big Screen: Virtual Production Stages are a modern way of handling special effects - they use it in The Mandalorian. We are working with one of our clients to find other, novel, uses for it.
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