The patterns of the world
Rebecca Page works as a data scientist at Endress+Hauser. Armed with a wealth of data, she gains new insights that plant operators can use to optimize processes and make better decisions.
The asphalt glistens as Dr Rebecca Page makes her morning commute into the office. A summer thunderstorm has broken the heat of the past few days. The Birs – a river near Endress+Hauser headquarters in Reinach, Switzerland – is surging, its waters muddy. For most, the rain and its effects are nothing more than mere weather. For the data scientist, though, they are a sign: river water contaminated with microbes could seep into the groundwater catchments and pollute the supply of drinking water. Specialists from the municipal water company will have to go out and take samples. Rebecca Page has been working on an early-warning system for situations just like this. The system, once ready to use, will be capable of predicting which reservoirs and wells are at risk of contamination and sending a timely alert to the authorities.
Making forecasts with measurements and mathematics instead of samples and laboratories is the task Rebecca Page dedicates herself to every day. The expert data scientist examines a wide range of measurement, flow and simulation data to find out how everything is interrelated. That data will later be used in the early-warning system. She is also working on a way to measure the quality of a dairy product without sampling it, as well as a method to dose expensive flocculants into dewatering systems with the precision it takes to extract as much valuable metal as possible from silt and mud without clogging anything.
