Inference tasks with time series over graphs are of importance in applications such as urban water networks, economics, and networked neuroscience. Addressing these tasks typically relies on identifying a computationally affordable model that jointly captures the graph-temporal patterns of the data. In this work, we propose a graph-aware state space model for graph time series, where both the latent state and the observation equation are parametric graph-induced models with a limited number of parameters that need to be learned. More specifically, we consider the state equation to follow a stochastic partial differential equation driven by noise over the graphs edges accounting not only for potential edge uncertainties but also for increasing the degrees of freedom in the latter in a tractable manner. The graph structure conditioning of the noise dispersion allows the state variable to deviate from the stochastic process in certain neighborhoods. The observation model is a sampled and graph-filtered version of the state capturing multi-hop neighboring influence. The goal is to learn the parameters in both state and observation models from the partially observed data for downstream tasks such as prediction and imputation. The model is inferred first through a maximum likelihood approach that provides theoretical tractability but is limited in expressivity and scalability. To improve on the latter, we use the state-space formulation to build a principled deep learning architecture that jointly learns the parameters and tracks the state in an end-to-end manner in the spirit of Kalman neural networks.

--Digital twins (DTs) help improve real-time monitoring and decision-making in water distribution systems. However, their connectivity makes them easy targets for cyberattacks such as scanning, denial-of-service (DoS), and unauthorized access. Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) that manage these systems often do not have enough budget or staff to build strong cybersecurity teams. T o solve this problem, we present a Virtual Cybersecurity Department (VCD), an affordable and automated framework designed for SMEs. The VCD uses open-source tools like Zabbix for real-time monitoring, Suricata for network intrusion detection, Fail2Ban to block repeated login attempts, and simple firewall settings. T o improve threat detection, we also add a machine-learning-based IDS trained on the OD-IDS2022 dataset using an improved ensemble model. Our solution gives SMEs a practical and efficient way to secure water systems using low-cost and easy-to-manage tools.

Water plays a fundamental role in the structure and function of proteins and other biomolecules. The thermodynamic profile of water molecules surrounding a protein are critical for ligand binding and recognition. Therefore, identifying the location and thermodynamic behavior of relevant water molecules is important for generating and optimizing lead compounds for affinity and selectivity to a given target. Computational methods have been developed to identify these hydration sites, but are largely limited to simplified models that fail to capture multi-body interactions, or dynamics-based methods that rely on extensive sampling. Here we present a method for fast and accurate localization and thermodynamic profiling of hydration sites for protein structures. The method is based on a geometric deep neural network trained on a large, novel dataset of explicit water molecular dynamics simulations. We confirm the accuracy and robustness of our model on experimental data and demonstrate it's utility on several case studies.

Pressure and flow estimation in Water Distribution Networks (WDN) allows water management companies to optimize their control operations. For many years, mathematical simulation tools have been the most common approach to reconstructing an estimate of the WDN hydraulics. However, pure physics-based simulations involve several challenges, e.g. partially observable data, high uncertainty, and extensive manual configuration. Thus, data-driven approaches have gained traction to overcome such limitations. In this work, we combine physics-based modeling and Graph Neural Networks (GNN), a data-driven approach, to address the pressure estimation problem. First, we propose a new data generation method using a mathematical simulation but not considering temporal patterns and including some control parameters that remain untouched in previous works; this contributes to a more diverse training data. Second, our training strategy relies on random sensor placement making our GNN-based estimation model robust to unexpected sensor location changes. Third, a realistic evaluation protocol considers real temporal patterns and additionally injects the uncertainties intrinsic to real-world scenarios. Finally, a multi-graph pre-training strategy allows the model to be reused for pressure estimation in unseen target WDNs. Our GNN-based model estimates the pressure of a large-scale WDN in The Netherlands with a MAE of 1.94mH$_2$O and a MAPE of 7%, surpassing the performance of previous studies. Likewise, it outperformed previous approaches on other WDN benchmarks, showing a reduction of absolute error up to approximately 52% in the best cases.

Al Tayer added: "In accordance with the wise leadership vision and directives, we continue to develop world-class infrastructure to keep pace with the growing demand for electricity and water in Dubai. The total production capacity of DEWA's desalinated water has reached 490 million imperial gallons per day (MIGD). We are keen to apply the best international practices in all our projects and adopt the latest technologies in the generation, transmission, distribution and control of electricity and water networks to raise production and operational efficiency.

The DiTEC (Digital Twin for Evolutionary Changes in water networks) project proposes an evolutionary approach to real-time monitoring of sensor-rich critical infrastructures that detects inconsistency between measured sensor data and the expected situation, and performs real-time model update without needing additional calibration. Deep learning will be applied to create a data-driven simulation of the system. The system is applied to water networks, where, in case of leaks, valve degradation or sensor faults, the model will be adapted to the degraded network until the maintenance takes place, which can take a long time. The project will analyse the effect on data readings of different malfunctions, and construct a mitigating mechanism that allows to continue using the data, albeit in a limited capacity. As part of the DiTEC project, the role of the PhD student will be to analyse historical and real-time sensor data, which includes parameters such as water speed, pressure, quality, network topology, and construct a number of deep learning (such as CNN and LSTM) models to explain and predict the behavior of the network short and long term.

Real-time control of pumps can be an infeasible task in water distribution systems (WDSs) because the calculation to find the optimal pump speeds is resource-intensive. The computational need cannot be lowered even with the capabilities of smart water networks when conventional optimization techniques are used. Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) is presented here as a controller of pumps in two WDSs. An agent based on a dueling deep q-network is trained to maintain the pump speeds based on instantaneous nodal pressure data. General optimization techniques (e.g., Nelder-Mead method, differential evolution) serve as baselines. The total efficiency achieved by the DRL agent compared to the best performing baseline is above 0.98, whereas the speedup is around 2x compared to that. The main contribution of the presented approach is that the agent can run the pumps in real-time because it depends only on measurement data. If the WDS is replaced with a hydraulic simulation, the agent still outperforms conventional techniques in search speed.

When a fifth of the people living in the city of Wakayama faced a three-day water stoppage last month to fix a 60-year-old pipe network, they rushed to get ready, only to learn that the repairs could be made without a shutdown. Some 3,000 complaints were filed with city officials, who said they had no way of knowing until they dug up the pipes. Cities across the world are facing similar challenges in dealing with deteriorating infrastructure because of a lack of precision in where and when to fix aging water pipelines. Now, some cash-strapped cities are embracing new technology to make water repairs more efficient, with the goal of cutting construction costs and lowering utility bills. The need is pressing, as global climate change, with an increasing frequency of floods, droughts and warmer weather, is overloading water systems.

Ranking pipes according to their burst likelihood can help a water utility triage its proactive maintenance budget effectively. In the research literature, data-driven approaches have been used recently to predict pipe bursts. Such approaches make use of static features of the individual pipes such as diameter,length, and material to estimate burst likelihood for the next year by learning over past historical data. The burst likelihood of a pipe also depends on dynamic features such as its pressure and flow. Existing works ignore dynamic features because the features need to be measured or are difficult to obtain accurately using a well-calibrated hydraulic model. We complement prior data-driven approaches by proposing a methodology to approximately estimate the dynamic features of individual pipes from readily available network structure and other data. We study the error introduced by our approximation on an academic benchmark water network with ground truth. Using a real-world pipe burst dataset obtained from a European water utility for multiple years, we show that our approximate dynamic features improve the ability of machine learning classifiers to predict pipe bursts. The performance (as measured by the percentage of future bursts predicted) of the best forming classifier improves by nearly 50% through these dynamic features.