 Live from Stanford University, it's theCUBE. Covering Stanford Women in Data Science 2020. Brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media. Hi, and welcome to theCUBE. I'm your host, Sonia Tagare, and we're live at Stanford University, covering the fifth annual WIDS, Women in Data Science Conference. Joining us today is Nisha Jami, who's the Director of Urban Water Policy for Stanford. Nisha, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you for having me. Absolutely. So tell us a little bit about your role. So I direct this Urban Water Policy Program at Stanford. We focus on building solutions for resilient cities. We try to use data science and also the mathematical models to better understand how water use is changing and how we can build future cities and infrastructure to address the needs of the people in the US, in California, and across the world. That's great. And you're going to give a talk today about how to build water security using big data. So give us a preview of your talk. Sure. So the 20th century water infrastructure model was very much of a top-down model. So we built solutions or infrastructure to bring water to people. But people were not part of the loop. They were not, the way that they behaved, their decision-making process, what they used, how they use it, wasn't necessarily part of the process. And we assume there's enough water out there to bring water to people, and they can do whatever they want with it. So what we are trying to do is we want to change this paradigm and try to make it more bottom-up to engage people's decision-making process and the uncertainty associated with that as part of the infrastructure planning process. So I'll talk a little bit about that today. And where is the most water usage coming from? So interestingly enough, in the developed world, especially in the western United States, 50% of our water is used outdoors for grass and outdoor spacing, which we don't necessarily, our lives don't depend on it. I'll talk about the statistics in my talk, but grass is the biggest crop you're growing in the US while you're not really needing it for food consumption and also uses four times more water than corn, which is a lot of water. And in California alone, if you just think about some of the spaces that we have, the grass or green spaces we have outdoors in these malls or institutional buildings or different outdoor spaces we have, some of that water, if we can save it, they can provide water for about a million or two million people a year. So that's a lot of water that we can be able to, we can save and use or actually repurpose for needs that we really have. So does that also boil down to like people watering their own lawns or is it the problem for much bigger grass usage? Actually, interestingly enough, that's only 10% of our water outdoor water use. The rest of it is actually the residential water use, which is what you and I, the grass you and I have in our backyard and watering it. So that water is even more than that amount that I mentioned. So we use a lot of water outdoors and again, some of these green spaces are important for community building, for making sure everybody has access to green spaces and kids can play soccer or play outdoors. But really our individual lawns and outdoor spaces, if they are not really a native landscaping, it's not something that we use enough to justify the amount of water you use for that purpose. So taking longer showers and all this stuff is very minimal compared to... No, not at all actually. Those are also very, very important. That's another 50% of our water that we use in our urban areas. It is important to be mindful the way we wash dishes, the way we take shower, the way we brush our teeth and not wasting water while you're doing that. And a lot of other individual decisions that we make that can impact our water use on a daily basis. Right, so tell us a little bit more about, right now in California we just had a dry February, which is the first in 150 years and this is a huge issue for cities, agriculture and for potential wildfires. So tell us about your opinion about that. So the 20th century's infrastructure model I mentioned at the beginning, one of the flaws in that system is that it assumes that we will have enough snow in the mountains that would melt during the spring and summertime and would provide us water. The problem is climate change has really, really impacted that assumption and now you're not getting as much snow which comes back to the fact that this February we have not received any snow. We are still in the winter and we have spring weather and we don't really have much snow on the mountain which means that's going to impact the amount of water we have for summer and springtime. This year we had a great last year, we got enough water in our reservoirs which means that we can potentially make it through. But when you have consecutive years that are dry and we don't receive a lot of water precipitation in a form of snow or rain, that would become a very problematic issue to meet future water demands in California. And do you think this issue is along with not having enough rainfall but also about how we store water or do you think there should be a change in that policy? Sure, I think that it definitely has something also in the way we store water. We definitely, we are in the 21st century, we have different problems and challenges. It's good to think about alternative ways of storing water including using groundwater sources, groundwater as a way of storing excess water or moving water around faster and making sure we use every drop of water that falls on the ground and also protecting our water supplies from contamination or pollution. And do you see us ever going to desalination or to get clean water? So interestingly enough, I think desalination definitely has worked in other parts of the world when you have smaller population or you have already tapped out of all the other options that are available to you. Desalination is an expensive solution, costs a lot of money to build this infrastructure and also again, depends on this centralized approach that we will build something and provide resources to people from that location. So it's very costly to build this kind of solutions. I think for California, we still have plenty of water that we can save and repurpose. I would say and also we still can do recycling and reuse. We can capture our storm water and reuse it. So there's so many other cheaper, more accessible options available before we go ahead and build a desalination plant. And you're going to be talking about sustainable water resource management. So tell us a little bit more about that too. So sustainable water resource management and occasionally I use also the word like building resilient water future. It's all about diversifying our water supply and being mindful of how we use our water. Every drop of water that we use is degraded and needs to be cleaned up and put back in the environment. So it always starts from the bottom. The more you save, the less impact you have on the environment. The second thing is you want to make sure every drop of water that we use, we can use it as many times possible and not make it, not take it, use it, lose it right away, but actually be able to use it multiple times for different purposes. Another point that's very important is actually a majority of the water that we use on a daily basis doesn't need to be extremely clean drinking water quality. For example, if you tell someone that we are flushing down our toilets, drinkable water, it would surprise you that we would spend this much time and resources and money and energy to clean that water to flush it down the toilet without necessarily using it. So basically rethinking the way we built this infrastructure model is very important being able to tailor water to the needs that we have and also being mindful of how we use the resource. So is your research focused mainly on California or the local community? We actually, the solutions that we built are now California focused. Actually, we try to build solutions that can be easily applied to different places. Having said that, because we are working sort of a bottom up way, we approach water from a bottom up, you need to have a local collaboration and local perspective to bring to this picture. And a lot of our collaborators have been so far in California, we have had data from them, we were able to sort of demonstrate some of the assumptions we had in California. But we work actually all over the world, we have collaborators in Europe, in Asia, and they're all trying to do the same thing and we are trying to sort of collaborate with them on some of the projects in other parts of the world. That's awesome. So going forward, what do you hope to see with sustainable water management? So to be honest with you, I would often be thinking about technology as a way that would solve all our problems and move us out of the challenges we have. I would say technology is great, but we need to really rethink the way we manage our resources and the institutions that we have and the way we manage our data and information that we have. And I really hope that we can revolutionize that part of the water sector and disrupt that part because as we disrupt this institutional part and provide more system level thinking to the water sector, I'm hoping that that would change the way we manage our water and then actually opens up space for some of these technologies to come into play as we move forward. That's awesome. So before we leave here, you're originally from Tehran and now you're in this data science industry. What would you say to a kid who's abroad who wants to maybe move here and have a career in data science? Sure. I would say study hard. Don't let anything to discourage you. We are all equal. Our brains are all made the same way. Doesn't matter what's on the surface. So I encourage all the girls to study hard and not get discouraged and fail as many times as you can because failing is an opportunity to become more resilient and learn how to grow. And I really hope to see more girls and women in these engineering and STEM fields to be more active and become more prominent. Have you seen a large growth within the past few years? Definitely. The conversation is definitely there and there are a lot more women and I love how Margo and her team are sort of trying to highlight the number of people who are out there and working on these issues because that demonstrates that the field wasn't necessarily empty, was just not highlighted as much. Right. So for sure, it's very encouraging to see how much growth we have seen over the years for sure. Nisha, thank you so much. It's really inspiring all the work you do. Thank you for having me, Sonia. Absolutely. Nice to meet you. I'm Sonia Tagare. Thanks for watching theCUBE and stay tuned for more.