Build an AI-powered System for Sanitation Improvements

Contact: James Hodson,  james@hodson.io

Short Description: SDG06 aims to ensure availability and sustainable management of water and sanitation for all. Build an AI model that identifies risks to human health caused by polluted drinking water and lack of sanitation.

Detailed Description: Today, 2.1 billion people lack access to safely managed drinking water services and 4.5 billion people lack safely managed sanitation services. A person without access to improved drinking water – for example from a protected borehole well or municipal piped supply for instance – is forced to rely on sources such as surface water, or other unprotected water sources. In the immediate environment, exposed fecal matter will be transferred back into people’s food and water resources, helping to spread serious diseases such as cholera, typhoid, infectious hepatitis, polio, etc. The lack of effective waste disposal or sewerage systems can contaminate ecosystems and contribute to disease pandemics. The objective of this project is to model disease occurrence and human mortality in areas that lack sanitation to identify where to secure the drinking water resources, suggest sanitation improvements, and inform policy decisions at the local, and country-wide levels. Projects will include Machine Learning models, data management platforms, and visualization engines to allow communities to interact with the data and assist in decision making. Successful projects will have the opportunity to present their products in front of community leaders, researchers, and policy-makers at the AI for Good Foundation Global Conference in 2019!

Possible Data Sets:

USGS: https://water.usgs.gov/owq/data.html

EU Open Data Portal: https://data.europa.eu/euodp/data/dataset/data_waterbase-water-quality

FAO UN: http://www.fao.org/nr/water/aquastat/main/index.stm

WHO: http://apps.who.int/gho/data/node.home

Waste Atlas: http://www.atlas.d-waste.com/

JPM: https://washdata.org/data

The World Bank: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.POP.TOTL

UN Data: http://data.un.org/

NASA: http://neo.sci.gsfc.nasa.gov/

More data…