GET Involved: A new Hackathon on taste and odour of water
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:
Water blending processes
Changes to water sources
Local distribution works
Repair/ replace/ maintenance works
Water processing decisions
Debris entering local supply
Domestic pipework issues
Property age and type
Chlorine residual effects
Changes in supply temperature
Rainfall
Social dynamics
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
TO FIND OUT MORE AND APPLY TO ATTEND/ FOR SPONSORED PLACES GO TO:
WWW.DEVPOST.WATERSENSE