Sponsored data integration and expression project with Northumbrian Water – Get involved

#Hack Series 2017-2018 Event 2:

Northumbrian Water Group (NWG), which includes Essex & Suffolk Water in the South East and Northumbrian Water in the North East of England.  We pride ourselves on offering excellent product and service and go to great lengths to ensure our product tastes great and smells good.  Needless to say we are keen to ensure our customers are happy with our product 100% of the time.

Very rarely we receive a complaint about a change in taste and odour (far less than 1% of customers contact us about this issue).  The events are few and far between but across our 2.7 million customers and 5 years of data there are sufficient to explore the root causes. 

To make this more challenging, as well as a low density and geographically distributed nature of recorded events, the range of factors that can lead to a perceived change in taste and odour sufficient to contact us are diverse.

Examples include:

1. Water blending processes
2. Changes to water sources
3. Local distribution works
4. Repair/ replace/ maintenance works
5. Water processing decisions
6. Debris entering local supply
7. Domestic pipework issues
8. Property age and type
9. Chlorine residual effects
10. Changes in supply temperature
11. Rainfall
12. Social dynamics
13. House moves/ customer relocation

The overall goal

Our goal is to maximise satisfaction by better understanding the hierarchy of factors, compound causal factors, and as a result, to develop analytics that enable making decisions that reduce the likelihood of a perceived change to taste and odour. 

This is a great opportunity to forge direct links with organisations that can engage and potentially work with you to develop commercial solutions.

Our goal is to discover analytics that can either:

• Demonstrate new ways to effectively identify and prioritise factors or combinations of factors leading to perceived changes to taste and odour
• Establish analytics that can predict perceived changes to taste and odour and support operational and process decision making that minimises events.

We are using this event to identify relevant skills and potential commercial suppliers.

About the event

We are organising an exciting 2-day initiative to bring together data analysts/data scientists, mathematicians and expression specialists to creatively explore the challenge. 

The hackathon will span two days and will take the form of a contest. Participants are welcome from the UK and overseas and can attend site or participate remotely.

The initiative is sponsored by Northumbrian Water, with the main event running across the weekend of the 9th-10th December 2017.  

The event will be led by +ADD Strategy our innovation partner, along with a number of postgraduate researchers with an interest in big data, data analytics and data exploration and expression.  Further NWG systems and BI specialists will be on hand during the data hack to assist with questions arising during the experiment.

The initiative will see teams form and compete to see who can produce the best and most impactful data insights including data expression, mashup or visualization relating to our challenge. 

Why participate?

ALL OF OUR OPEN INNOVATION PROJECT HAVE LED TO COMMERCIAL OPPORTUNITIES FOR PARICIPANTS.  RESULTS HAVE RANGED FROM INVESTED PROOF OF CONCEPTS, TRIALS, DEVELOPMENT CONTRACTS AND EVEN JOBS!!!  OUR HACKATHONS HAVE CREATED AWARD WINNING ANALYTICS THAT HAVE BEEN APPLIED IN INDUSTRY>

Engage with one of the largest organisations in the North - NWG have an £800m turnover and invest heavily in regional skills, expertise and innovation. We are actively seeking enterprising organisations that can help us resolve complex problems.

Collaborate with other disciplines and organisations - Hackathons are a great way to meet and work with a wider range of stakeholders. Present will be professional application developers, business leaders, academics and researchers as well as other groups.

Help to solve a scale real world challenges - We are working to ensure our future services are safe, secure and offer best value to the public. Your involvement not only supports your local community but potentially could establish data innovations that have application across utility or infrastructure management.

Commercial potential and profile – Customer satisfaction with potable water is a critical measure of performance for all water companies.  We are offering companies a unique opportunity to co-create commercial analytics solutions.

$1,000 in prizes

Free to attend:

There is no charge for participating and in fact there are 6 sponsored places.  

A few sponsored places:

In recognition of the opportunity cost of participating for 2 days, NWG are providing a contribution £500 of 6 sponsored places. 

If you are from an SME (small or medium sized organisation), you can apply for one of these through the application form.  These are selected based on merit and potential to contribute

Registering to participate:

Please register to  ENTER HERE

you can indicate your interest in securing funding on the form.

Once you have registered please be sure to get your team to submit thier profiles to the watersense.devpost hack site community.  We will be communicating here and registering final submissions and showcasing results here too.

If you have any questions please contact Paul Sutherland, Innovation consultant, (T:07738 284 310) or email paul.sutherland@nwl.co.uk

Accessing the data:

Aspects of the data will be closed and others open. Those close will be in-person and data will only be released onsite.

Technical details and open data will be available via our hackathon site (https://watersense.devpost.com)

Needless to say on signing up and undertaking confidentiality terms, a document outlining the detailed challenge and the rules of the competition in more detail will be released.

• Practicality in application (0-20)
  How useful is the report in its intended real world situation
• Completion of evidence solution (0-20)
  How complete or polished the report is.
• Novelty (0-20)
  How unique and innovative is the report in application
• Data expression and usability (0-20)
  How well-designed is the report, paying attention to user experience and user interface