Clean Technology Meets Data Science: News and Articles

  Today, let’s look at some of the ways in which sensors, machine learning and other data science tools are helping solve problems in the water sector Water conservation   is one of the largest components of the water sector. And with the droughts hitting California, New South Wales and South Africa recently, there’s been a lot of focus on education and changing people’s behavior through information.  So how do we make it easy for people to do their best to minimize water use?   Companies and organizations have tried several different approaches – public education programs about water use being one such example. Another being the water comparison report that water companies in California started sending out to their customers with the monthly bill. It’s a short summary that shows how your water usage compares with your neighbors and how much water you have used against your allocation. This is a fairly straightforward use of data science – it uses a nearest neighbor approach with a bui

  In today’s post, we’ll take a look at a few problems in Agriculture and Food that are being solved using machine learning, computer vision, social networks and satellite data among other data science tools. What do social networks, sensors, food and farms have in common? Social media immediately makes us think about Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, Whatsapp, Google and all the different ways in which we human beings connect with each other today. All these apps use Graph and Network Theory to understand how people may be connected to each other, the links between them and how strong or weak those connections are. Reid Hoffman of LinkedIn famously said that “we’re all six weak connections apart from each other” and in today’s connected world, that number looks like it’s getting smaller and smaller. So what would social media have in common with agriculture? First, there’s always the way in which farmers and workers interact and connect with each other.   Several startups like the Farmer

  Over the next few months, we’re going to take a quick look at examples of problems in clean technology where data science is used to create solutions. This is our “snippets series” for the year and an introduction for folks who are interested in a flavor of what data science and clean tech can do together. This series of posts will focus on several clean tech sectors – starting with the Agriculture and Food sector.