In a closed-door simulation, insurers played out their response to a mass disruption by China's Volt Typhoon hackers--and found a nightmare scenario. It's around an hour and 10 minutes into the role-playing game I've been invited to observe, a simulated catastrophic cyberattack on US water utilities, when the whole thing begins to feel less like a fun afternoon playing Dungeons & Dragons and more like a plausible threat to civilization. A full 24 hours of in-game time have passed since hackers disrupted 5,000 water utilities across the United States in this imagined scenario. Joshua Corman, the former Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency strategist serving as our dungeon master, stands at the front of a conference space in an office tower high above Times Square, narrating the latest updates to the game's participants, a few dozen insurance executives set up in six teams. All of them have gone disturbingly silent. It's about to get harder," Corman says. "I'm going to share a few things, and it's going to hurt." It is, of course, still the same April afternoon as when we started--but in game time, the second-order effects of widespread water outages have started to become clear. Food refrigeration systems are failing at cold storage warehouses. Water-dependent drug and chemical manufacturing has been bottlenecked, leading to insulin shortages. Data centers' cooling systems are failing, causing outages of cloud services. Most critically, 2,000 hospitals are without water, hampering patient care and in some cases leading to evacuations as HVAC systems shut down and the July heat--the game takes place just before Independence Day in 2027--bakes facilities. Worse yet, Corman is playing a looping video onscreen, at the front of the room, showing a burst water main: The hackers have managed to trigger not just IT disruption but also, in at least some cases, real physical destruction that will take far longer to fix. "Everyone downstream is without water pressure," Corman says. "There are no breaks in real incident response," Corman explains just before the giant water pipe starts gushing onscreen. "If you have to go to the bathroom, go to the bathroom.

Artificial intelligence (AI) offers government utilities a transformative opportunity to improve public service, update outdated processes and centralize data. In particular, water utilities can use AI to make timely repairs and adjustments in a way that poses fewer inconveniences for citizens. One way to facilitate such AI modernization within water utilities is through public-private partnerships. Cities like Tucson, Ariz., and Newark, N.J., are leading by example. Tucson teamed up with VODA.ai in August 2020 to bring AI technology to its water infrastructure systems. Prior to using AI technology as a tool, the city relied on pipe-break history and human judgment to drive maintenance projects. Newark Water and Sewer also adopted AI to make more informed decisions and to take a more proactive approach to improve water infrastructure, according to Tiffany Stewart, assistant director of the utility. The department is using two artificial intelligence systems for unique purposes.

Human settlement has always been dependent on a stable supply of clean water nearby. With the increase in global population and a decline in the quality of our freshwater resources, we are constantly looking for technologies that will ensure a reliable supply of clean water. The Union Budget 2021-22 announced Jal Jeevan Mission (Urban) to bring safe water to 2.86 Cr households through tap connection. This in line with the Centre's rural water supply project launched in 2019. Finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman announced an outlay of INR 50,011 Cr for this scheme.

With cloud computing IT services and resources can be uploaded to and retrieved from the Internet as opposed to direct connection to a server. Files can be kept on cloud-based storage systems rather than on local storage devices. According to IndustryWeek, a distributed computing paradigm edge computing brings computer data storage closer to the location where it is needed. In contrast to cloud computing, edge computing refers to decentralized data processing at the edge of the network, according to Klaus Schwab, founder and executive chairman of the World Economic Forum. The IIoT requires more of an edge-plus-cloud architecture rather than one based on purely centralized cloud; in order to transform productivity, products and services in the industrial world.

Qualitative data science sounds like a contradiction in terms. Data scientists generally solve problems using numerical solutions. Even the analysis of text is reduced to a numerical problem using Markov chains, topic analysis, sentiment analysis and other mathematical tools. Scientists and professionals consider numerical methods the gold standard of analysis. There is, however, a price to pay when relying on numbers alone.

It's easy to take water for granted. Turn on the tap, and you'll receive clean, life-giving water (with some very notable exceptions). But for a myriad of reasons, ranging from our changing climate to aging infrastructure to growing demands for water, all aspects of the water cycle -- how it is collected, cleaned, distributed (and repeat) -- are overdue for a technological makeover. For one thing, the workforce behind our waterworks is aging, at least within the public water utility sector, which is composed of an astounding 50,000 individual systems. "Lots of senior engineers are 30 years into their job and are reaching retirement," says Will Maize, a water industry analyst with market research firm Bluefield Research.