The project team plans to further develop a new enabling technology for groundwater modeling - one that has the potential to substantially reduce the costs of groundwater sustainability investigations and could change how groundwater is managed, how data is collected, and even how people collaborate. Under this initiative, the project team has developed a cloud-based groundwater simulation system, that is delivered as a service, not as a product, and is live-linked to a massive pre-processed spatial database, allowing one to zoom in anywhere covered by the database to make a preliminary prediction of groundwater flow and contaminant transport. Additionally, the software allows users to add their own data to that provided by the service, refining model predictions and allows aggregating user data, essentially turning users into co-developers/collaborators and building value as a side-effect of their use of the application.
As sustainability is among the greatest challenges in the 21st century and recent IT and data revolution offers unprecedented opportunities for potential breakthroughs in the ability to understand and manage complex systems, interactions, and sustainability. These possibilities, however, are largely unrealized, primarily because the technologies to produce big data are not matched by technologies to analyze them. The project team recently partnered with the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality to develop this integrated computational infrastructure in groundwater science and engineering. The collaboration takes advantage of existing programs - statewide database development and data integration from a network of state, federal, and other institutional storehouses on the part of the State and computational advancements, specifically in hierarchical GIS-based modeling, stochastic modeling, and real-time visual simulation and data analytics, on the part of the project team - and exploits the synergies of integrating these efforts to significantly improve our knowledge-creating infrastructure to understand, characterize, model, and visualize complex groundwater systems.
Working with a paradigm-changing goal in mind, Dr. Li and his team at Michigan State University have developed – through eight NSF awards, a major Michigan Department of Environmental Quality initiative – an advanced modeling and data analysis infrastructure that supports knowledge-creation through modeling, visualizing, characterizing, and ultimately understanding complex aqueous environmental systems. The emerging technology has received resounding endorsements from environmental and groundwater experts in both the public and private sectors. As it matures and reaches its full potential, the service – designed for all types of user, from inexperienced students to environmental professionals – will improve the way in which individuals envision, research, and understand the subsurfacel environment. The service will not only reduce barriers to understanding but also reduce costs associated with environmental investigations. We foresee the service being used to increase public literacy in environmental sciences and thus attract more and diverse individuals to the study of science in general. At the same time, the service will help change the way in which we manage the environment by changing the way in which work on environmental projects. The envisioned changes derive from: 1) the data-enabled core of the service that provides an interactive interface that vastly reduces effort required to produce meaningful results; and, 2) the coupling of this core with an online, social platform that can be accessed by users anywhere, at any time, to perform groundwater modeling and data analysis tasks for any geographic location. This ultimately leads to a powerful online community with a collective intelligence that allows people to collaborate in ways previously impractical, enhances research opportunities and methods, and thus fosters extraordinary knowledge creation. Realizing these changes will have dramatic economic impacts and allow for the development of a robust and competitive environmental science workforce. Achieving this vision will require not only the proposed service, but also numerous fundamental shifts in the relationships between academic research and technological innovation and the institutions behind these efforts. In order to have the desired impact, the service and its support efforts must transition from the incubating environment of the university to the competitive arena of the marketplace. To prepare for this transition, the project team received a grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) Innovation Corps (I-Corps) program that gave them access to resources to help determine the readiness of the service and the team for the transition and ultimately understand the transition process and the essential information required to successfully do so. The project focused on three main issues: 1) developing a technology demonstration for potential customers and partners, 2) defining a clear go/no go decision regarding viability of products and services, and 3) should the decision be to move the effort forward, a transition plan to do so. The team developed a live demonstration of the service and used this as an introduction to the service at the 100 interviews that were conducted with potential customers. From the discussions with the customers, the team was able to develop numerous important insights that ultimately allowed the team to understand a number of important factors, including: the value of the service to the customer, the issues the customer is having that causes them the value the service, understanding the demand for the service and ways that it can be increased, defining the methods through which the service would be delivered to the customers based upon their preferences and needs, defining the revenue generating characteristics of the service and projecting a number of possible scenarios, identifying essential partners and the strategies for cooperating, and the cost of the efforts / resources required to undertake the transition and move forward. The details of each of the 100 interviews have been submitted to the NSF and a summary of the overarching ideas has been presented in the final project report to the NSF. Due to the sensitive nature of this information as concerns the marketplace success of the service, this information is not presented in this public report. Following the success of the customer interviews and the positive feedback gathered from these experiences, the decision was made to proceed and a company was formed to manage the commercialization process. The project team developed a transition plan designed to get the technology into the marketplace in a reasonable time frame. The major elements of the transition plan include: procuring initial funding from local, state, and national organizations to finance early company operations and product development; the development of a prototype of the platform for proof-of-concept and additional technical implementation and business process research; the official launch of the platform as a for-profit operation; growth of the user network and other value-added improvements to the system; and finally substantial outside investment to fuel rapid growth once the technology has proven its value to the water resources community at large.
