AQUA Score: Mapping Morocco's Invisible Water Warriors
AQUA Score is a project focused on addressing the water management challenges faced by rural communities in Morocco's High Atlas Mountains. These villages, despite requiring only modest funds, struggle with accessing support due to limited visibility and resources. The project aims to objectively quantify water issues in these communities and connect them with potential supporters.
The Problem of Water Management in Rural Morocco
In the High Atlas Mountains, rural communities face significant difficulties in managing water resources due to their isolation and lack of visibility. Despite modest financial needs, these villages encounter substantial barriers to accessing the support they require. The primary challenge lies in the lack of objective data quantifying their water issues and the inability to connect these communities with donors or experts who can provide assistance.
Added Value: AquaScore's Water Mapping Solution
AquaScore provides a solution by creating a comprehensive water map that identifies remote villages and assigns them water scores based on satellite imagery and crowdsourced data. By ranking villages according to their water criticality, AquaScore helps funders and supporters pinpoint where their assistance will be most effective. Additionally, the platform fosters community engagement by offering a space to discuss water solutions and includes gamification features to encourage active participation.
Innovation: Data Generation and Refinement
AquaScore's innovative approach to data generation is key to its success. In areas with limited data availability, the system creates datasets from scratch, starting with an automated baseline derived from satellite imagery. This baseline is then enriched with user-generated content, creating a closed-loop system that continuously improves the accuracy and relevance of water scores through active learning techniques.
AI Integration: Computer Vision and NLP for Water Assessment
AquaScore employs a hybrid AI approach that combines Computer Vision (CV) and Natural Language Processing (NLP). CV algorithms are used to segment satellite images and generate initial baseline water scores. Meanwhile, NLP algorithms extract valuable insights from textual data, including user reports and online sources, to enhance the accuracy of these scores. This powerful combination enables an objective assessment of water criticality and ensures continuous improvement in the ranking of villages.
Technical Details
The AQUA Score team has already aggregated data on 1,322 villages in the High Atlas Mountains, using satellite imagery extracted and segmented with Facebook's Segment Anything model. This process was performed on UM6P servers, utilizing 500GB of storage and 80 CPU cores. In the future, the system will incorporate user-submitted reports and internet-scraped data to further refine the water scores and ensure the highest level of accuracy.
Impact: Promoting Water Sustainability and Efficient Resource Allocation
AquaScore enhances the visibility of rural Moroccan villages by providing objective assessments of their water criticality. This enables donors and water management experts to allocate resources more efficiently and equitably. The AI-driven approach ensures that assistance reaches communities in need in a fair and unbiased manner, ultimately promoting water sustainability and improved management practices in resource-constrained environments.
The Neptune Wizards Team
The AQUA Score project is led by the Neptune Wizards team from UM6P. Their dedication to leveraging AI and community engagement aims to bring water solutions to some of the most remote and underserved areas of Morocco.