Accelerating our current momentum toward smart water

Abstract

The world is becoming smarter and faster than ever before. Smart technologies are helping improve the quality of human life in all aspects, e.g., the way humans are transported ("smart mobility"), the way we live ("smart homes"), the way we communicate with each other ("smart communications"), the way we manage our health ("smart health"), and the way we are educated ("smart education"), among others. The water sector is a domain with the greatest potential and most room for improvement through the application of smart technologies. Recently, the concept of "smart water" has elicited particular attention, and is being considered as the only solution for current global water crisis, from climate change and droughts, to overpopulation (e.g., Los Angeles, London, and Cape Town). Smart water consists of two key components: smart sensing and smart decision making. Real-time sensing/monitoring of micro-to macro-level water demand and other water variables enhances our system awareness, through which we can make much better operational and management decisions. More system information and better judgment may be possible. There is no doubt that the core of smart technologies is advanced artificial intelligence (AI), such deep learning algorithms (DLAs). A Go match between the 18-time world champion, Sedol Lee, and a computer Go program developed by Google DeepMind based on DLA, AlphaGo, has clearly shown that machine intelligence can solve highly complicate problems if well trained with massive amounts of data. Many water problems can make the best use of this AI and machine learning. Big-data gathered in real-time are remotely fed to an AI, from which useful information and features can be selected and interpreted for yielding an optimal real-time decision. Enhanced computing technologies (high-performance computing) accelerate the process, whereas ICT provides a high-speed pathway among the afore-mentioned entities, i.e., smart sensing and AI decision making. To allow Smart Water to successfully address and deliver the aforementioned issues , we augmented six new associate editors, with expertise in artificial intelligence, hydroinformatics, and green-blue water infrastructure, to our editorial board. I took over as Editor-in-Chief to accelerate our momentum toward smart water Prof. Phillipe Gourbesville maintained during the last two years. We also revised and updated the scope and themes of the journal to cover various issues in smart water management (SWM). Some of the major new additions are as follows: Smart Water (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. Kim Smart Water (2018) 3:2 https://doi.