Alejandra Puig Infante, Ministry for Ecological Transition

Alejandra Puig Infante is the Deputy Assistant Director, Water Protection and Risk Management Subdivision, Spanish Water Agency, Ministry for Ecological Transition.

About the presentation

Spanish Ministry for Ecological Transition Integral Water Cycle Digitalization Plan

Roxana Marin, Xylem

Roxana Marin, VP Xylem Eastern Europe, leads commercial operations in the area, including sales in Central Asia, Greece and Israel. She has over 18 years of international experience in positions of P&L responsibility in sales, production, logistics in Central America, Switzerland, Eastern Europe, as well as strategy and business development in Romania and a global HQ in Switzerland, mostly in the construction industry. She focuses on integral business transformations with multicultural teams and strongly advocates for education and diversity and inclusion as sources of higher and more sustainable performance for any organization. She graduated Business Administration in English in Romania.

María Angeles Vicente, Aqualia

María Angeles Vicente graduated as an Industrial Engineer from the Polytechnic University of Zaragoza (Spain) and completed the Advanced Management Masters Program at IE (Instituto de Empresa) as well as the Executive Program for Women in Senior Management at ESADE. Her professional career has always been linked to technology and the utilities sector. She worked for 10 years at Naturgy as Director of commercial systems and responsible for defining the integration processes between Union Fenosa and Gas Natural. At Aqualia, she has been responsible for the Digitization, Information Systems and Technologies of the Group since 2010.

About the presentation:

Digital Management of a water service

Ainhoa Lete, BuntPlanet

A visionary leader, Ainhoa is passionate about the scope for cutting-edge technology to contribute to environmental issues. She has worked with water utilities and city councils as a digital transformation advisor in the environmental field. Her key ambition is for BuntPlanet to create a better world with the help of technology. 

About the presentation:

Consorcio de Aguas de Bilbao, in collaboration with BuntPlanet and the water meter laboratory of the University of the Basque Country, has successfully rolled out a digital strategy for water meter management optimization and the reduction of commercial losses. The results of the project will be shared and compared with case studies of similar BuntPlanet projects from around the world.

Sharing the stage with: Representatives of the Consorcio de Aguas de Bilbao involved in the case study.

Sergio T Coelho, Baseform

Sergio T Coelho co-founded and leads Baseform, a company making forward-thinking software for water utilities. He has a PhD in Civil Engineering Systems and has over 25 years of experience in leading applied R&D, contributing to the state of the art in demand analysis, hydraulic & water quality simulation, performance assessment and utility and infrastructure planning. 

About the presentation:

Leveraging facts (data) to achieve rational results – The term ‘digitalization’ has gained widespread visibility in recent years to designate the trend towards the conversion of processes to digital supports and the generation of data and analytics that it is hoped will lead to increased efficiency and more rational, better-performing results. This presentation is focused on Baseform’s experience with the everyday application of its software by utilities, leveraging existing data, and driving very concrete and measurable results in the areas of non-revenue water, meter management and infrastructure asset management.

María Gil, Idrica

María Gil has over 10 years of experience in boosting the digital transformation of companies, and is passionate about technology. Maria is an IoT expert and has designed products and services for government, water utilities, the aeronautical industry and agri-food companies. She has managed technical and sales areas, led teams, and defined and developed business strategies. This experience, paired with her academic training, has given her a global business vision oriented to achieving objectives in times of growth, expansion and crises. She is currently the Country Manager for Spain at Idrica, successfully managing key public- and private-sector accounts.

About the presentation:

Digital sustainability: the future of water is here – Water utilities are facing different challenges as a consequence of droughts, floods, agri-food industry demands, difficulties in planning and undetected losses in networks. In this context, digital transformation is being increasingly adopted by utilities to boost water and energy efficiency, and anticipate extreme events related to climate change. How can the present and future success of this process be ensured? The only way is to apply digital sustainability criteria. This innovative concept involves guaranteeing the integration and analysis of data to make better decisions, even if utilities use different technologies and providers. This presentation includes different case studies showcasing how IoT, big data and artificial intelligence can guide the efficient, environmentally sustainable use of water resources.

Nerea Landaburu Aranzabal, Consorcio de Aguas Bilbao Bizkaia

Nerea is a civil engineer graduate from the University of Cantabria. She currently holds the position of deputy director of water supply works and project planning at the Bilbao Bizkaia Water Consortium.

About the presentation:

Aerial robotics are starting to be used in underground locations such as mines and civil engineering projects. The main technological challenge is to replace the lack of GNSS information (GPS) with other information sources relative to the underground scenario the robot is flying through. CABB has tackled the innovation challenge of using small autonomous drones with onboard navigation capabilities passing through 40 km of water tunnels constructed nearly 100 years ago. The revolutionary system can produce 3D models of the tunnel shape and provide information about the infrastructure surface status, which is crucial for looking for faults during the out-of-field inspection. The system minimises the risks, costs and time relative to human surveying while enhancing outcomes.

Sharing the stage with: Fran Espada, Hovering Solutions

Apostolos Tzimas, EMVIS | PrimeWater

Apostolos Tzimas is the Managing Director of EMVIS S.A He has a deep knowledge of the water sector with particular focus on water infrastructure planning, development and management, working closely with public and private sector water bodies. In the field of water resources management, he provides specialized consultancy services and advisory work to competent central and regional authorities for issues related to the implementation of EU water related legislation. He is acting as technology purveyor in digital transformation projects in the water sector. He has co-ordinated the EU funded Research & Innovation project SPACE-O (http://www.space-o.eu/). Currently he is the co-ordinator of the EU flagship project for international cooperation of EU Copernicus Program PRIMEWATER (https://www.primewater.eu/) and IFOS Project (http://emvis.gr/index.php/ifos) funded by Innovation Norway. He is active member of professional associations (IWA, CIWEM, ISWA, IEMSS) and Technology Platforms (Water Europe).

About the presentation:

Creating a Watershed Digital Twin for operational hydro-ecological forecasting services – The presentation demonstrates how a Watershed Digital Twin can integrate meteorological forecasting with hydrological modelling in the upstream catchments and 3D hydrodynamic and water quality modelling in the reservoir. This enables the production of short-to-medium term forecasts (up to 10 days) of hydrological quantities (river discharges, water temperatures, nutrient & suspended sediment loads) as well as critical water quality related parameters (algae, nutrients, dissolved oxygen, etc.). On the same time satellite imagery from Landsat-8 and Sentinel-2A/B is used to observe a set of key variables for water quality like chlorophyll-a, turbidity and surface temperature, which are used along with in-situ monitoring data to improve the predictive skill of ecological forecasting through Data Assimilation (DA) techniques. Both sequential DA methods and variational DA schemes (modified 4D-Var) are supported. The performance of the process-based models are further improved using Machine Learning (ML) models to identify and correct systematic errors. In addition to the process-based models, Machine Learning (ML) models are used to forecast phytoplankton dynamics using hydro-meteorological predictors.

Magnus Arnell, RISE Research Institutes of Sweden / Lund University

Dr. Magnus Arnell is research leader at RISE Research Institutes of Sweden and Lund University, Sweden. Magnus works as Ass. Programme Director for the national research programme Mistra InfraMaint on smart asset management of municipal infrastructure and as chair of the national research cluster VA-kluster Mälardalen on sustainable wastewater systems. Dr. Arnell is IWA Fellow since 2016.

About the presentation:

A roadmap for digital transformation of urban water systems – To enable broader digitalization, water utilities need to get the fundamental, soft and technical, digital infrastructure in place. The process more resembles organizational change management than an IT-project. A roadmap in four steps and two actions is presented for utilities to embark on the digital transformation

Francisco Cubillo, Aquarating

Francisco Cubillo is co-author of AquaRating, an International Standard for Assessing Water and Wastewater Services. He’s a member of the AquaRating Technical Committee. He’s co-authored the third Edition of Performance Indicators for Water Supply services. He has more than 30 years of experience in  Urban Water Services Planning and Management, and is actively involved in international events.

About the presentation:

Focusing on digital maturity and transformation. One of the AquaRating tools for utility improvement – For water utilities, there is no sustainable improvement without innovation and digital transformation. That is why AquaRating incorporated a new tool to make reliable diagnosis, analysis, and recommendations for using innovation and digitalization as means towards an efficient and sustainable transformation. The presentation will describe the tool and the results of its application in several water utilities.

João Feliciano, AGS

João Feliciano, CEO of AGS and Chairman of Aquasis, leads the Groups, in its operations in the urban water cycle and in its offer in digital solutions. He has a PhD in Civil Engineering and an MBA. With more 20 years of experience in the water sector his main ambition is to promote the knowledge transfer between utilities with different maturity stages, enhancing the “democratization of the performance and quality of service”.

About the presentation:

AGS being a Portuguese Company (owned by the Japanese Group – Marubeni), and either a holding company with the responsibility to manage our own group utilities or a service provider to private and public water services (external to the Group), has a deep interest in sharing its technological path into the digital water solutions. It would be important for AGS to share with the audience how we’ve tackled our own solutions’ architecture strategy and its development and how we see ourselves, and others, promoting and achieving higher efficiency levels. Several tools and software were developed in AGS by applying methodologies that were outputs and outcomes of several research programmes, mainly, related to strategic asset management and coordinated by LNEC (Portuguese National Laboratory of Civil Engineering).
AGS recently acquired the IT water company Aquasis, taking a new step in its technology path and broadening its scope into new areas covering the entire urban water cycle and paving the way for new developments.

William Sarni, Water Foundry

Will Sarni is the founder and CEO of water strategy consultancy, Water Foundry. He is also the CEO  of the Colorado River Basin Fund, the first placed-based water-focused investment fund in the United States. Prior to Water Foundry, Sarni was a managing director at Deloitte Consulting where he established and led the water strategy practice. He was the founder and CEO of DOMANI, a sustainability strategy firm, prior to Deloitte. Sarni is the author of five books and a co-founder of WetDATA and a host of the podcast, The Stream with Will and Tom. He is a board member of Flowater, Silver Bullet, Project WET and the Rocky Mountain Rowing Club. He was the Chairman of the Scientific Advisory Board for the WAITRO Global Water Innovation Summit 2020 and was on the Scientific Program Committee for Stockholm World Water Week from 2013 through 2019. His advisory work includes working with the 2020 X-PRIZE (Infinity Water Prize), as a Bold Visioneer for the 2016 X-PRIZE Safe Drinking Water Team and a Technical Advisor for the Climate Bonds Initiative: Nature- Based Solutions for Climate and Water Resilience. He is also on the Editorial Board of the Journal of Water Security.

About the presentation:

The Digital Watershed (TM) and Watershed Health: Corporate water strategy and digital innovation for impact Watershed health is critical for communities and economies and is at risk as a result of increasing demand, overallocation, aging infrastructure, and climate change. This presentation will discuss corporate strategies and case studies from corporations, technology providers, and investors on available and emerging digital water technologies to build and sustain healthy watersheds and improve water resource management. The session would include case studies from PepsiCo and/or AB InBev providing examples of how digital water technologies are integrated into the supply chain, manufacturing, and ecosystem investments coupled with perspectives from innovative digital technology companies and their investors.

Youri Amerlinck, Aquafin NV

Dr Youri Amerlinck is active in the field of digital technology for water technology. Assuming several roles in operations, consulting, management, academics and as company co-founder, throughout his career, he gathered insights from multiple perspectives. At Aquafin he is involved in the mathematical modelling and optimization of biological and chemical processes, digital twins, sensor technology, Internet of Things technology and process control. He is very active in SWAN (Smart Water Networks Forum) and he is also a guest lecturer on mathematical modelling of WWTPs at Unesco IHE Delft and the University of Antwerp.

About the presentation:

You’ll never walk alone on the digital transformation journey – In Flanders, Aquafin, a wastewater utility, collects and treats, each day, over 2 billion litres of domestic wastewater in 321 WWTPs. Today, not only the quality of the water but the whole ecological footprint is important, wastewater treatment has become a multi-criteria optimization challenge. In order to tackle this, Aquafin embraces the technologies of the future (such as Big data, the Internet of things and smart control). In order to facilitate the application of these technologies, Aquafin embarked on a digital transformation, which is an (ever) ongoing process in which internal and external stakeholders and partners are involved.

Nicolas Caradot, KWB, and Ulf Stein, Ecologic Institute 

Nico is working since 2010 at Kompetenzzentrum Wasser Berlin, a leading R&D institute on urban water management. He is the head of a research group on smart city and infrastructure and the coordinator of the European H2020 innovation project digital-water.city. Nico is also the coordinator of DigitalWater2020, a recently founded group aiming at addressing synergies and complementarities between H2020 digital water projects.

Dr. Ulf Stein studied landscape planning and nature conservation at Leibniz University Hannover (Germany), the University of Guelph (Canada) and the University of Copenhagen (Denmark). He completed his doctorate at the University of Kassel, where he also lectured freshwater ecology, water resource management and geographic information systems (GIS). Dr. Ulf Stein joined Ecologic Institute in 2011, where today he coordinates the institute’s water activities as a Senior Fellow. His work focuses mostly on the enhancement of the European Union’s and German water policies and the sustainable management of water resources. His current activities include innovation projects that support the digital transformation of the water sector.

About the presentation:

Digital-water.city: assessing the benefits of digitalization in five European water utilities – For almost 4 years, digital-water.city (DWC) has developed and brought to the market more than 15 digital solutions addressing key challenges facing water and sewer utilities. As DWC reaches its end, we aim to highlight the lessons learnt from each of the demonstration cities in the project: Berlin, Copenhagen, Milan, Paris, and Sofia. In particular, our presentation will provide the following: (1) an overview of promising digital water innovations and the benefits achieved in our five partnering cities. Learn how Paris is harnessing the potential of new sensors and machine learning to open its rivers to swimmers or how Berlin uses sensors to tackle the issue of sewer illicit connections. (2) Our recommendations to policymakers to tackle the current policy gaps and foster the digitalisation of the European water sector

Javier Climent, Hydrens

Javier Climent is a PhD graduate in Industrial Technologies at Universitat Jaume I (UJI). Previously he studied Chemical Engineering and has a master’s degree in Energy efficiency and Sustainability. He is the CEO at HYDRENS and the R&D project manager at FACSA Water company. He developed his PhD in Water Treatment modelling processes using Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD). He is involved in different task groups related to this topic such as the CFD modelling at the International Water Association (IWA).

About the presentation:

VIRAL project is a cutting-edge digital solution which combines CFD techniques with Artificial Intelligence. This innovative modelling tool enables the application of CFD solutions, not only for the design but also for operational processes in water treatment facilities. Moreover, it provides testing of new control strategies.

Sharing the stage with: Eduardo Ayesa, CEIT

Cosmin Koch, Acciona

Dr. Cosmin Koch the Head of Digital Innovation in the Innovation Department in Acciona Agua in Barcelona, Spain. His work focuses on process modeling, control systems design, developing machine learning algorithms and in using new digital technologies to improve the operation of different water treatment processes.

About the presentation:

The water sector is experiencing an accelerated digital transformation fueled by connectivity, higher monitoring capabilities and the development of IT platforms. A critical role in this transformation is played by digital innovation that brings advanced algorithms, multiparameter optimization, and deep learning applications that broaden the portfolio of solutions from optimal design to optimal control of the assets.

Nicolas Picard, Veolia

After 15 years spent in Veolia Water Operations as Drinking Network Manager and support to operations, Nicolas joined the IS&T Corporate team in 2017 as Product Manager. Regarding his technical background and knowledge regarding water networks, hydraulic modelling, and Non-Revenue Water issues, he is in charge of Water Loss Management build since the very beginning of the project in 2018. Today he manages the product roadmap, supports the rollouts and runs processes to deliver as much value as possible for Veolia’s Business Units.

About the presentation:

Water Loss Management is a digital tool designed by Veolia to reduce water losses in Drinking Water Networks. The goal of this module is to provide the Control Room or the Network Manager with an overview of the assets and KPIs to reduce non-revenue water. Water Loss Management is designed to improve the water distribution network performance by analyzing water losses at District Metering Areas (DMA) level. The module analyses data from network sensors: revenue meters, flow meters and pressure sensors. It provides continuous water loss balance, differentiating physical losses and commercial losses, in each DMA in a standard way.

Sharing the stage with: David Maisonneuve, Water Networks Technical Expert at Access to Water & Sanitation

Eric Voost, Waternet

Eric Voost is Asset Manager at Waternet.

About the presentation:

Implementing Asset Management at Waternet: the Water Cycle Approach. – In November 2010 a catastrophic failure almost occurred in the city of Amsterdam. Waternet was literally out of control after a report of possible failure with a big sewerage pressure pipe due to nearby construction works. Within only a few hours, control was taken over by the municipality’s incident control team. Boards of directors don’t like being out of control and resulting in the birth of the asset management department in 2012. The task was clear: implement asset management. To start with an overview of potentially critical assets. The risk assessments started out as learning on the job. Not only developing a methodology but also learning about the assets and the colleagues who operate and maintain them. The bottleneck, not surprisingly, is located within the registration and accessibility of data. This concerns all kinds of information, like asset registers, failure data, settings, procedures and financial figures. Data management and digitalization turned out to be the key. Waternet is on an exciting asset management journey and we would love to share our experience on this.

Sharing the stage with: Eljakim Koopman, Waternet Digitalization Department.

Biju George, Ampcus, Inc.

Biju George serves as the Executive Vice President, Utilities. He is responsible for technology products and services development and delivery to all our water and energy utility customers in this capacity. Mr. George has more than 35 years of diversified technical and management experience. He is recognized as an innovative leader in the water sector. Mr. George served as the Chief Operating Officer and Executive Vice President roles at DC Water, Executive Director of Greater Cincinnati Water Works, and Deputy Director position at Metropolitan Sewer District of Greater Cincinnati. Mr. George has built a reputation of building public sector contracting services by offering billing and call center services during his tenure with Greater Cincinnati Waterworks, and international service offerings and successful commercialization of intellectual properties while at DC Water. Mr. George has a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering, and he is a licensed professional engineer in Ohio.

About the presentation:

Cybersecurity & US Water Systems. Based on his 30-plus years of leading the water sector, Mr Biju George brings the state of Cybersecurity within US Water and Wastewater utilities. The presentation covers the evolving regulatory framework and federal funding. The presentation will also briefly review how the utilities and service providers collaborate to mitigate cybersecurity risks and assure resiliency to the water sector. 

Eduardo Martinez Mendizabal, Grupo SIA INDRA Cybersecurity

Eduardo Martínez-Mendizábal is the SIA Indra Group cybersecurity head for Central Europe. He has over 15 years of cybersecurity experience providing and operating BPO IT cyber solutions – risk management, BCP & recovery plan, CyberSec Services & Solutions, SASE and cloud sec, Digital Identity, Access Management & eSignature.

About the presentation:

Comprehensive OT and IT monitoring and detection model: a key factor for proactive cybersecurity management in the water sector – A dynamic threat landscape in an environment where digitization opportunities are pushing the water sector towards a higher level of digital dependencies requires proactive, flexible, and scalable cybersecurity management. The nature of different potential sources of valuable information, the challenge of managing progressive assets and network visibility, and the need for a coordinated response to any cyber-incident are all key challenges that must be considered for an effective monitoring and detection strategy.

Harsha Ratnaweera, NMBU

Harsha is a professor in water process technologies at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences and the founder of the innovative process control company DOSCON. He has worked to reduce the gap between process specialists and control engineers. His initial research focus on process optimisation has recently changed into digital tools in process optimization and surveillance using hybrid sensors. 

About the presentation:

Best practices to minimise cyber risks – use of innovative process surveillance and control to manage cyber risks. Several national and regional strategies for managing cyber risks are available. They provide valuable suggestions and resources to develop new national and utility-level strategies. While preventive actions are crucial in cyber security management, it is also important to identify when a utility is under attack and implement recovery measures to minimize impacts. Examples of innovative and affordable process surveillance and process control solutions are valuable. 

Saleh Alfuwaires, Saudi Aramco

Saleh Alfuwaires is a cyber security engineer, working as a Senior Industrial Computer Engineer at Saudi Aramco. Saleh is leading the robotic and unmanning operation facility approach at Saudi Aramco. His computer science background let him develop his professional path to lead cyber security inside Saudi Aramco.  He worked on several projects related to industrial network cyber security.  He is interested and specialized in knowledge transfer and deploying innovative solutions. Currently, he is working on a project to building centralized solutions that remotely control several robots serving the industrial revolution which ensures cost saving, reliability, and efficiency.

About the presentation:

Digital Eyes – cybersecurity of unmanned remote operation – Aramco’s Sea Water Injection Department (SWID) created a robust cybersecurity program to enable unmanned operation of remote facilities for seawater injection into oil reservoirs. SWID has deployed unique solutions to assure cybersecurity. An Artificial Intelligence cybersecurity solution triggers alerts to system administrators in the case of any threats 24/7. In addition, AI and Robotics have been deployed to mitigate any physical attack by integrating a physical intrusion detection system with the plant’s control alerting system. Moreover, SWID deployed Security Information & Events Management (SIEM) solution using Splunk and ArcSight to extract security logs from SWID facilities’ industrial control systems such as DCS, ESD, SCADA, among others and sends them to a Security Operation Centre (SOC) to review and identify possible cybersecurity threats and communicate it to cybersecurity system administrators.

Jordi Raich Montiu, s::can GmbH, and Aleix Martorell, Consorci d’Aigües de Tarragona (CAT) 

Jordi Raich holds a PhD in Environmental Analytical Chemistry from the University of Barcelona and has more than 15 years of experience in the water industry. Jordi joined s::can ten years ago as European project manager and after three years in the company, he founded s::can Iberia, the Spanish s::can subsidiary. Since then, he is been responsible to start and continue real-time water quality projects in surface, drinking and wastewater with many key water companies in Spain. In parallel, Jordi has been very active in European networks and projects. Two years ago, Badger meter acquired s::can and, since then, he was also appointed as Analytical Solutions Manager.

Aleix Martorell is a Chemical Engineer with more than 10 years of experience managing large seawater desalination projects, such as the challenging Tampa Bay Seawater Desalination Plant (25 MGD), with Acciona Agua. At present and for three years, he has been managing a 4 m3/s Drinking Water Facility along with the Distribution System that provides safe drinking water to 63 municipalities and 26 industries (1 million people), with the Consorci d’Aigües de Tarragona.

About the presentation:

The use of online water quality monitoring to improve operations in the drinking water treatment plant and the distribution network – A real case in the province of Tarragona (Spain).

Kevin Nirsimloo, Altereo

Kevin Nirsimloo is a qualified engineer from the Institut National des Sciences Appliquées of Toulouse. He joined Altereo in 2005. He possesses 17 years of experience focusing on strategic and engineering studies for water utilities, technical audits and asset management in France and abroad. He is today a Partner and Director of Development for Altereo and much of his work is focused on developing asset management projects with the HpO AI technology. He is part of National Workgroups in France and a board member at ASTEE (Association Scientifique et Technique pour l’Eau et l’Environnement) on water network performance and asset management and has co-authored several technical guides on the subject.

About the presentation:

Between 2018 and 2022, SEDIF (Syndicat des Eaux d’Ile de France) and Altereo conducted a research and development project on the analysis and prediction of failures on distribution mains, service connections and accessories, and the support and automation of the asset replacement decision process. The project involved massive data mining and wrangling stages, machine learning of large datasets, failure prediction on different asset families among which the water distribution mains. The presentation exposes one of the concrete results of this project: an intelligent process for the automatic creation of optimised renewal worksites. Indeed, pipe renewal planning consists of aggregating individual pipes in order to achieve a minimum job size. The starting point is one or more neighbouring pipes that have been prioritised for replacement. While there are now proven and effective approaches to prioritising individual pipes, the final stage of worksite planning remains manual and can be a source of loss of efficiency in the replacement programme and time for the utility’s teams. Asset management of drinking water networks is a process that goes from knowledge management to rational and optimised replacement. In addition to the use of data and the prediction of the risk of failure, which already provide performance levers that have already been demonstrated, the automation of the process of creating optimised pipe renewal projects provides an additional lever for improving renewal performance and saving time for the staff in charge of the asset management policy.

Sharing the stage with: SEDIF (Syndicat des Eaux d’Ile de France)

Miguel Toledo Montero, Datakorum

Miguel Toledo is a Telecommunications Engineer leading the Transformation for Water, Energy, and Environment in Datakorum. Helping to drive innovation and embedding technology and new ways of working in the infrastructure transformation. He leads the biggest Advance Metering Infrastructure projects in Abu Dhabi and Dubai. Deploying Water, Energy, and Gas smart infrastructures in a CAS (Connectivity as a Service). His experience in the field with real projects provides one of the best visions for the future of digital water transformation.

About the presentation:

Digital twin with real-time high-frequency data collection – Case study of the implementation of a high frequency remote reading system in a water supply system, for remote management through continuous reading every 15 minutes, for performance improvement, fault detection, demand prediction, a disruptive result in energy savings and environmental sustainability.

Sharing the stage with: Jorge Francés, Representative of AQLARA, involved in the case study.

Murillo Oliveira Borges and Rodrigo Pereira, Iguá Saneamento

Murillo Borges graduated in Electrical Engineering. Currently, he is the Innovation and Digitalization Director in Iguá Saneamento, the third largest private sanitation company in Brazil. He leads the Innovation team, and a spin-off company dedicated to speeding up digitalization through smart metering, IoT sensors and data analytics. He coordinates all the operational digitalization plans and has over 15 years of experience in the utility sector with the first 12 years in power generation and distribution. He is focused on transforming the company using data.

Rodrigo Pereira, Operational Development Manager at Iguá Saneamento, one of the largest private companies of sanitation in Brazil. He leads the holding operational team, being responsible for developing strategies along with our field units to enhance the Iguá operational performance to an excellent standard. As part of the strategies, making water digital and transform the culture to a data-driven approach has a significant role in his actuation. He dedicated his 10 years of career to water sector and has experience in water and wastewater treatment, distribution and collection systems, waste disposal and innovation. He graduated in Environmental Engineering and has a master’s in science degree in Chemistry Engineering.

About the presentation:

A 360° view of a digitalization process in a sanitation company in Brazil. Since the customer to the infrastructure. This presentation is focused on the challenges of the Brazilian sanitation sector, mainly after the New Regulatory Framework. We’ll show the experience of Iguá’s in digitalization, our long-term plan, our achievements and learned lessons.

Rafael Giménez, Agbar

Rafael Giménez is the Head of the Digital Research Team at Agbar, which works on transferring state-of-the-art Artificial Intelligence into operational solutions to improve the efficiency of the water cycle and environmental management. Rafael is a Software Engineer who has been leading cross-disciplinary AI teams for the last few years across different industries such as Fintech and Mobility. Before joining Agbar, he held different responsibilities around conceptualization, technical leadership and coordination in multiple research projects on Scalable AI, IOT or decentralized social networks. Additionally, Rafael has also driven projects and initiatives at the European level such as the coordination of working groups in Water Europe and the ICT4Water Cluster.

About the presentation:

From DALL-E to the biofactory: next-generation Computer Vision supporting the intelligent operation in Wastewater Treatment Plants – Wastewater treatment is clearly appointed as a major concern by the 2030 Sustainable Development Goal 6 on water and sanitation, with an explicit focus set by Target 6.3 which aims for reducing the proportion of untreated wastewater.  Wastewater operators are embracing this scenario by implementing a novel vision for the traditional wastewater treatment plant (WWTP): the biofactory. Biofactories support the transition towards a circular economy by ensuring high-efficiency operations and enabling the recovery of added-value subproducts and energy from wastewater. Deep Learning applied to Computer Vision may become one of the key enablers of such transformation. The exponential boost of GPU-driven Computer Vision systems and novel Machine Learning models has opened an entirely new industry with multiple well-known applications such as autonomous driving and transferring those capabilities into wastewater networks. WWTP brings massive opportunities to address the realisation of biofactories. The presentation will showcase how the R&D teams at Agbar are using state-of-the-art Computer Vision to build next-generation services for wastewater treatment plants, and how such innovation is transferred and scaled into operation through the Dinapsis initiative.