{"id":5911,"date":"2016-04-14T09:00:31","date_gmt":"2016-04-14T16:00:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.msdn.microsoft.com\/msr_er\/?p=5911"},"modified":"2017-05-17T15:08:49","modified_gmt":"2017-05-17T22:08:49","slug":"securing-safe-water-through-cortana-intelligence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/blog\/securing-safe-water-through-cortana-intelligence\/","title":{"rendered":"Securing safe water through Microsoft&#8217;s Intelligent Cloud"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft size-full wp-image-5921\" src=\"https:\/\/msdnshared.blob.core.windows.net\/media\/2016\/04\/REACH_MRC-BLOG_900x300.jpg\" alt=\"REACH\" width=\"100%\" height=\"100%\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/uploads\/prod\/2016\/04\/REACH_MRC-BLOG_900x300.jpg 900w, https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/uploads\/prod\/2016\/04\/REACH_MRC-BLOG_900x300-300x100.jpg 300w, https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/04\/REACH_MRC-BLOG_900x300-768x256.jpg 768w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 900px) 100vw, 900px\" \/><\/p>\n<p><em>By <a href=\"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/people\/kenjitak\/\" target=\"_blank\">Kenji Takeda<span class=\"sr-only\"> (opens in new tab)<\/span><\/a>, Solution Architect and Technical Manager, Microsoft Research<\/em><\/p>\n<p><a class=\"msr-external-link glyph-append glyph-append-open-in-new-tab glyph-append-xsmall\" href=\"http:\/\/www.geog.ox.ac.uk\/graduate\/research\/jkatuva.html\">Jacob Katuva<span class=\"sr-only\"> (opens in new tab)<\/span><\/a> 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. \u00a0Now 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.<\/p>\n<p>Millions of people across the world fear not having enough water on a daily basis, living in a state of \u201cwater insecurity.\u201d\u00a0The time spent finding and carrying water, if local wells are not reliable, steals precious time from farming, making a living or going to school.\u00a0 It can even force people to revert to unsanitary water sources shared with animals. Water issues are tied to a cycle of poverty.<\/p>\n<p><a class=\"msr-external-link glyph-append glyph-append-open-in-new-tab glyph-append-xsmall\" href=\"http:\/\/www.geog.ox.ac.uk\/staff\/rhope.html#bio\" target=\"_blank\">Robert Hope<span class=\"sr-only\"> (opens in new tab)<\/span><\/a> is trying to break this cycle with the <a class=\"msr-external-link glyph-append glyph-append-open-in-new-tab glyph-append-xsmall\" href=\"http:\/\/reachwater.org.uk\/about-reach\/who-we-are\/\" target=\"_blank\">REACH initiative<span class=\"sr-only\"> (opens in new tab)<\/span><\/a>, 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 <a class=\"msr-external-link glyph-append glyph-append-open-in-new-tab glyph-append-xsmall\" href=\"http:\/\/www.robots.ox.ac.uk\/~davidc\/people.php\">David Clifton<span class=\"sr-only\"> (opens in new tab)<\/span><\/a>, an associate professor; and graduate student <a class=\"msr-external-link glyph-append glyph-append-open-in-new-tab glyph-append-xsmall\" href=\"http:\/\/www.dtc.ox.ac.uk\/people\/13\/colchesterf\/\" target=\"_blank\">Farah Colchester<span class=\"sr-only\"> (opens in new tab)<\/span><\/a>, both from Oxford\u2019s Institute of Biomedical Engineering.<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\">\u201cThe REACH program is aiming to make five million poor people water secure in Africa and Asia,\u201d Hope explains. Katuva, a graduate student with Hope,\u00a0helps compile socioeconomic data about the people who use the wells.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/FCWMe1snMP8\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>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. \u00a0Colchester has been taking the data from these sensors and using machine learning to predict the depth of water in the wells.\u00a0How 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. \u201cAzure Machine Learning makes fitting my machine learning models much faster,\u201d she said. \u201cI can explore the parameter space much quicker on the cloud than on my computer.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>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 <a class=\"msr-external-link glyph-append glyph-append-open-in-new-tab glyph-append-xsmall\" href=\"http:\/\/www.azure4research.com\/\">Azure for Research<span class=\"sr-only\"> (opens in new tab)<\/span><\/a> award that allowed them to scale their work out using the cloud.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cImagine you have multiple intelligent nodes. They\u2019re 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,\u201d Clifton said. The cloud-based system allows the use of machine-learning algorithms on that integrated data. Microsoft&#8217;s Intelligent Cloud\u00a0is 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.<\/p>\n<p>Understanding the groundwater depth is critical to mapping the \u201chealth\u201d of the whole water system, Clifton said.<\/p>\n<p>Decision makers need to know when water supplies are low, and how they fluctuate. Achieving water security requires investments, and those investments require information.\u00a0 Hope worries about the huge \u201cinformation deficit.\u201d REACH can be the remedy to that.\u00a0 \u201cMany 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,\u201d he said.\u00a0 This data can make a difference on that wide policy scale, but it can also help to speed repairs when hand pumps break\u2014making 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.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cMy hope and aspiration \u2026 is to see this system making my village and other villages back in Kenya water secure and moving them out of poverty,\u201d Katuva said. \u00a0Hope believes the REACH partnership may widen and grow to create broader benefits for poor people around the world.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Learn more <\/strong><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><a class=\"msr-external-link glyph-append glyph-append-open-in-new-tab glyph-append-xsmall\" href=\"http:\/\/reachwater.org.uk\/\">REACH project<span class=\"sr-only\"> (opens in new tab)<\/span><\/a><\/li>\n<li><a class=\"msr-external-link glyph-append glyph-append-open-in-new-tab glyph-append-xsmall\" href=\"http:\/\/www.smithschool.ox.ac.uk\/research-programmes\/water-programme\/\">Smith School Water Programme, University of Oxford<span class=\"sr-only\"> (opens in new tab)<\/span><\/a><\/li>\n<li><a class=\"msr-external-link glyph-append glyph-append-open-in-new-tab glyph-append-xsmall\" href=\"http:\/\/www.robots.ox.ac.uk\/~davidc\/index.php\">Computational Health Informatics (or CHI) laboratory, University of Oxford<span class=\"sr-only\"> (opens in new tab)<\/span><\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/server-cloud\/cortana-intelligence-suite\/overview.aspx\">Cortana Intelligence Suite<span class=\"sr-only\"> (opens in new tab)<\/span><\/a><\/li>\n<li><a class=\"msr-external-link glyph-append glyph-append-open-in-new-tab glyph-append-xsmall\" href=\"https:\/\/azure.microsoft.com\/en-us\/services\/machine-learning\/\">Azure Machine Learning<span class=\"sr-only\"> (opens in new tab)<\/span><\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/academic-program\/microsoft-azure-for-research\/\">Microsoft Azure for Research<span class=\"sr-only\"> (opens in new tab)<\/span><\/a><\/li>\n<li><a class=\"msr-external-link glyph-append glyph-append-open-in-new-tab glyph-append-xsmall\" href=\"https:\/\/azure.microsoft.com\/en-us\/\">Microsoft Azure<span class=\"sr-only\"> (opens in new tab)<\/span><\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>By Kenji Takeda, Solution Architect and Technical Manager, Microsoft Research 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. \u00a0Now he is part of a research team at the University of Oxford using cloud [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":39507,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"msr-url-field":"","msr-podcast-episode":"","msrModifiedDate":"","msrModifiedDateEnabled":false,"ep_exclude_from_search":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[197938,194452,194475,194478,194481],"tags":[186889,205437,193659,196386,205499,205513],"research-area":[13556,13563,198583,13554],"msr-region":[],"msr-event-type":[],"msr-locale":[268875],"msr-post-option":[],"msr-impact-theme":[],"msr-promo-type":[],"msr-podcast-series":[],"class_list":["post-5911","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-case-studies","category-computational-thinking","category-database-data-analytics-platforms","category-ecology-and-environment","category-human-centered-computing","tag-cloud-computing","tag-cortana-intelligence-suite","tag-microsoft-azure","tag-microsoft-azure-for-research-award","tag-reach-project","tag-water-insecurity","msr-research-area-artificial-intelligence","msr-research-area-data-platform-analytics","msr-research-area-ecology-environment","msr-research-area-human-computer-interaction","msr-locale-en_us"],"msr_event_details":{"start":"","end":"","location":""},"podcast_url":"","podcast_episode":"","msr_research_lab":[],"msr_impact_theme":[],"related-publications":[],"related-downloads":[],"related-videos":[],"related-academic-programs":[204065,204068],"related-groups":[],"related-projects":[],"related-events":[],"related-researchers":[],"msr_type":"Post","byline":"","formattedDate":"April 14, 2016","formattedExcerpt":"By Kenji Takeda, Solution Architect and Technical Manager, Microsoft Research 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. \u00a0Now he is part 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