Clean Technology Meets Data Science: News and Articles

I was at the   Open Water for California   conference in Sacramento last week - a conference dedicated to data science for water, with a focus on California. The conference itself was well attended with people from many different sectors - academia, government, non-profits and community members. What was particularly interesting is that it had an entire track devoted to hackathons and building new tools to solve some of the pressing problems being faced in water today - as well as the more traditional sessions with talks on the latest research and tools for the water sector.   The hackathon were focused on issues related to understanding trash movement into water sources (especially plastic), building consumer confidence reports on water safety and tools to better understand drinking water sources. There was a lot of interest in water safety understandably, with Flint still fresh in our minds and the recent focus on water quality issues in California communities affected by the wildfir

  How many times did you think about water this month? If you’re like most people in developed countries, you probably only thought about it when paying your water bill – or if there were news articles about floods or droughts or oceans. If you’re in parts of the world where water is not plentiful, the chances are that you thought about it if you had to plan your day around when water was going to come out of the tap. If, like many of the poor, you had to walk miles or stand in queues to collect drinking water, you probably spent a large part of your day thinking about it. Water is essential to life and yet, we don’t hear a great deal about innovation or venture capital funding or startups that are changing the world in this sector in popular media or news. Which brings up the question – where is the funding for innovation in this sector? Venture capital funding in water is a relatively small investment compared to the investment in high-tech or even in some of the other clean tech sec

  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

  What happens when you have two interdisciplinary fields that are changing what people think is possible? Fields that are expanding rapidly but on the surface seem completely  unrelated? Where each field has more jobs and opportunities than people with the skills to fill them? What if you integrated both fields to solve issues and problems that impact billions of people and the Earth itself? That’s the question that scientists and researchers were asking themselves when computational tools became widely available and the problems we were facing as a species on the Earth became critical. Ecoinformatics started out in the scientific research community as a way to use databases and develop algorithms to test hypotheses concerning natural systems. However, today it has expanded to encompass so much more. Today, Ecoinformatics is where clean technology and data science meet. It’s a field that’s become so broadly defined that it includes almost everything that concerns the Earth and the use

  Welcome to Ecoformatics LLC – an independent company that was founded to bring the latest scientific advances and market research in clean technology and big data to individuals and companies by  providing cutting-edge information and technical know-how through   information products  and  consulting services . Who’s the company for? It’s for anyone who is interested in understanding how artificial intelligence and data science are helping to solve problems related to the earth and environment – in water, agriculture, energy and so much more. If you’re a scientist, engineer or someone who’s interested in technology, our ebooks, workshops, courses, webinars and reports will keep you up to date on the latest research and tech happenings. If you’re interested in what’s happening in the market, we provide a look at funding news, in-depth analyses of the startups and companies working in the space and market trends. If you’re interested in career changes or simply working on problems that