AI and Data in the water sector | Innovation Festival 2025
Data, Data Everywhere
Softwire is excited to lead a hands-on, collaborative sprint at this year’s Northumbrian Water Innovation Festival.
We’re bringing together innovators from the water industry, data and beyond to tackle real challenges across the water treatment lifecycle. We’ll explore how recent advances in data and AI can transform overwhelming water treatment data into actionable information, focusing on solutions that only the latest generation of tools have made feasible, such as:
- A “control-room copilot” that transforms overwhelming SCADA alarms into clear, prioritised operator actions
- Could machine learning flag underperforming assets and recommend alternatives based on operating data from similar sites?
Whether you work with capital projects, SCADA systems, digital transformation or AI tools – or just want to explore how new technologies could solve problems in your space – this is your opportunity to get involved.
Event details:
- Date: 7–10th July 2025
- Location: Newcastle Racecourse
- Cost: Free to attend
Who is it for?
We’re especially keen to hear from:
- Capital projects and asset management professionals
- SCADA engineers and operational decision-makers
- Data scientists, ML engineers, and software developers
- Innovation leads, product designers, and transformation teams
But if you’re passionate about using data and AI to make a difference, you’re welcome.
To register, choose the sprint called “Data Data Everywhere” (sponsored by Softwire).
Meet the sprint leads
Zoë Fay
Lead User Researcher
Zoë is a Lead User Researcher and user-centred design leader at Softwire. She’s shaping research strategy, user centred design operations, best practice, and exploring how emerging technologies are influencing service design. Zoë has a pivotal role in delivering impactful, user-focused outcomes for clients across the public and private sector. She has pioneered a quad model of project leadership where UCD co-leads alongside tech, product and delivery roles. Zoë has over 10 years’ experience in both the public and private sectors, with a strong conviction for pragmatic ways of working and building healthy team cultures as a foundation for impactful service delivery.
Ellen Skipper
Technical Lead
Ellen is a Technical Lead who works across diverse full-stack projects, with a particular interest in incident management. She manages the feature development and BAU support for a train ticketing mobile app with 500k active users and 5 star app store ratings. Previously, she led development of a marketing automation tool which transformed a manual task taking weeks into one taking less than an hour. She takes satisfaction in seeing projects through the full life cycle, including examining assumptions early on to ensure that a project genuinely solves the problem it targets.
Outside her core technical work, Ellen finds a lot of meaning in mentoring and training junior developers. She is also interested in the idea of building communications between technical and non-technical team members to achieve a team with unified understanding of problems.
