Edmonton Engineering Firm Leads the Way for AI in Water Treatment

Drayton Valley, AB, October 20, 2020

ISL Adapt, an Edmonton infrastructure technology start-up, with the help of a variety of local innovation partners, is piloting a novel machine learning water treatment process in Canada.

ISL Adapt, a sister company to Western Canada’s longstanding ISL Engineering and Land Services Ltd., was created to identify and design AI opportunities that can improve community infrastructure. Working with the University of Alberta’s Reinforcement Learning and Artificial Intelligence Lab (RLAI), the Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute (Amii), and the Town of Drayton Valley; the project will focus on process control, automation and data analytics.

“We will demonstrate the possibilities of Reinforcement Learning in the domain of water treatment processes and industrial control.” says Jason Kopan, ISL Adapt’s Lead Water Infrastructure Engineer. “This is the first step in developing AI-driven water treatment systems that can shift the paradigm of water treatment in Alberta and beyond.”

“We’re really excited to be working alongside the team at ISL Adapt, both because we get to provide our expertise in reinforcement learning and we get to benefit from their expertise in real systems control,” says Martha White, Amii Fellow and Associate Professor at the University of Alberta. “Reinforcement learning is a key tool for anyone looking to the future of control processes and industrial automation, and this is an opportunity to demonstrate that as well as solve a real problem right here in our community. Drayton Valley has been a great partner too, and the Water Treatment Plant offers an ideal environment for exploring more advanced techniques for water treatment.”

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