Jacob Katuva used to get up at dawn to cycle 12 miles from his village to collect water with his uncles and cousins when he was growing up in Kenya. Now he is part of a research team at the University of Oxford using cloud computing and mobile sensors to monitor water wells and help ensure that thousands of villages in rural Africa and Asia have a safe, secure supply of water.
Millions of people across the world fear not having enough water on a daily basis, living in a state of “water insecurity.” The time spent finding and carrying water, if local wells are not reliable, steals precious time from farming, making a living or going to school. It can even force people to revert to unsanitary water sources shared with animals. Water issues are tied to a cycle of poverty.
Robert Hope is trying to break this cycle with the REACH initiative, which is funded with UK aid from the UK government and has many partners, including UNICEF. Hope is an associate professor at Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom. The team includes machine learning experts David Clifton, an associate professor; and graduate student Farah Colchester, both from Oxford’s Institute of Biomedical Engineering.
The team has developed sensors, like those in smart phones and fitness bands, to put inside the pump handles on rural wells to monitor groundwater and speed repairs to broken pumps faster. These accelerometer and gyroscope sensors record the up-and-down motion of the pump handles. Colchester has been taking the data from these sensors and using machine learning to predict the depth of water in the wells. How the pump handles move and vibrate reveals whether the water is coming from a deep or a shallow source, helping to predict how much remains underground. She developed these models on her desktop computer, but is now able to accelerate her work by using the cloud. “Azure Machine Learning makes fitting my machine learning models much faster,” she said. “I can explore the parameter space much quicker on the cloud than on my computer.”
The work so far has been focusing on developing accurate methods for water depth estimation, but is now getting ready for widespread deployment across Kenya. The team faces the new challenge of how to scale out their smart system in a reliable way. The team took advantage of an Azure for Research award that allowed them to scale their work out using the cloud.
“Imagine you have multiple intelligent nodes. They’re all transmitting data. You have to integrate data in a cloud-based system from data nodes across an entire region, tens of thousands of pumps, in our case,” Clifton said. The cloud-based system allows the use of machine-learning algorithms on that integrated data. Microsoft’s Intelligent Cloud is a key to this, enabling them to move straight from the lab and into practice using R and Python in Azure Machine Learning. The tools can be shared easily, making this ideal for collaboration with their partners.
Understanding the groundwater depth is critical to mapping the “health” of the whole water system, Clifton said.
Decision makers need to know when water supplies are low, and how they fluctuate. Achieving water security requires investments, and those investments require information. Hope worries about the huge “information deficit.” REACH can be the remedy to that. “Many hundreds of millions of dollars are invested each year in major projects, but little evidence is available in terms of whether they deliver impacts at scale, particularly for poor people,” he said. This data can make a difference on that wide policy scale, but it can also help to speed repairs when hand pumps break—making life better for individual villages, one repair at a time. Repairs that once took a month might be done in a couple of days. Tools such as Power BI will help these decision makers better understand the complex data, empowering them to make the right policy-decisions.
“My hope and aspiration … is to see this system making my village and other villages back in Kenya water secure and moving them out of poverty,” Katuva said. Hope believes the REACH partnership may widen and grow to create broader benefits for poor people around the world.
Using ChronoZoom to build a comprehensive timeline of climate change in the cloud
A professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, explores the history of climate change in depth in his graduate-level Earth System Science class. To help students visualize events through the ages, he is developing a comprehensive history of climate change by using ChronoZoom, an open-source community project dedicated to visualizing the history of everything.
Building a historical view of climate change
Each year, Jeff Dozier, professor of Environmental Science and Management at the University of California, Santa Barbara, teaches a course in Earth System Science to between 80 and 100 incoming graduate students. Among the issues he teaches: climate record and how the Earth’s climate has changed through the ages—and what drivers are behind those changes.
Covering millions of years’ worth of warming trends within a class term is a challenge; managing the massive volumes of data, charts, videos, illustrations, and other support materials is even more daunting. Dozier needed a way to pull together his materials into an accessible—and manageable—manner.
He found the solution in the award-winning ChronoZoom tool.
ChronoZoom allows users to navigate through "time," beginning with the Big Bang up until present day events. Users can zoom in rapidly from one time period to another, moving through history as quickly or slowly as they desire. In 2013, a third-party authoring tool was built into ChronoZoom, enabling the academic community to share information via data, tours, and insights, so it can be easily visualized and navigated through Deep Zoom functionality.
Visual aids can have a particularly powerful impact when discussing climate change. Dozier is developing a history of the Earth that illustrates changes in climate from the beginning of the planet through modern day. The source materials include images, diagrams, graphs, and time-lapse movies that illustrate changes in the environment. Dozier plans to use the timeline as a teaching aid in his Earth System Science class.
“ChronoZoom has been easy to master and use,” Dozier notes. “You don’t need any sort of client-side application except a browser. All the data is stored on someone else’s machine. The processing is done in the cloud [through Windows Azure], not on your own computer. And the only thing that really shows up on your own computer is the results.” Moreover, thanks to the power of Windows Azure, the tool has the flexibility to scale up and down, enabling users to zoom in on a particular segment in time or zoom out to review climate change from the beginning of recorded history through today. Plus, content developers can share their presentations or timelines with others by simply sharing a link or posting it to a social media site.
Make your mark on history
ChronoZoom has already been used to illustrate the history of the Earth and explore the impact of climate change on the planet through the ages. There are many unexplored possibilities, however. The tool scales up and down, meaning any project can benefit—whether it’s the history of the world or just a review of the last few weeks. Dozier is hopeful others will use ChronoZoom to tell their stories by uploading their own data, images, and text to the cloud and using those materials in the classroom.
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