17 Days of AI for Good — SDG 6— Clean Water and Sanitation

Goal: Ensure availability and sustainable management of water and sanitation for all

AI XPRIZE Suggestion: “The Internet-of-Things (IoT) and sensors feeding into the AI of Everything are predicting sanitation and consumption patterns for improved safe water and sanitation provisioning.” — AI XPRIZE

Using AI to Improve Clean Water Access

I don’t know much about this domain and look forward to find out more (if you have ideas share them here, I’ll keep updating these posts during the Summit).

My first thought, as usual, is for what kind of decision making or optimization problem there could be here to solve. For example, if clean water access in some region is influenced by flooding and management of dams, then you could consider how to build in objectives that encapsulate all of the health issues fully.

A major challenge for this SDG would seem to be the huge complexity and diversity of systems, both human and natural, that influence water quality. How to build models that predict outcomes reliably? How to ensure all the necessary components are included? How do you fuze all the data that will be stored in unrelated locations?

Mark Crowley has no official affiliation with IBM, XPrize, ITU or the UN. The views and opinions expressed here are entirely his own.