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Experts, Entrepreneurs Use Innovation to Improve Lake Erie

The summit will award $50,000 in cash and assistance to one of nine big ideas designed to parlay an environmentally challenged lake into a business proposition.

(TNS) -- CLEVELAND, Ohio -- The Cleveland Water Alliance is bringing experts on water, the environment and technology to Cleveland this week for an innovation summit designed to find scientific solutions to Lake Erie's problems.

The inaugural ErieHack Water Innovation Summit will include days of speakers. But the centerpiece will be the finals of the ErieHack competition, where one of nine big ideas designed to parlay an environmentally challenged lake into a business proposition will win $50,000 in cash and assistance.

Representing Northeast Ohio are:

  • WaterWarriors, which developed a system for arming middle and high schools with testing kits to take samples from the Lake Erie watershed and the test them for phosphorus and nitrogen using spectrometers.
  • Hydrosense, which designed a buoy that contains a sensor for detecting harmful toxins in the water.
  • Fish.IO.AI., which is looking to catalogue as many fish as possible in Lake Erie, which will help track the growth and whereabouts of invasive species. The project team, which includes data scientists from Progressive Insurance, are using technology that allows photos of fish to be downloaded to a website called whatismyfish.net.
Among the other participants in the finals is a Toledo team that is developing a solar-powered drone to provide continuous monitoring of the lake.

That's just the kind of innovation that Jeff Reutter wants to see. The former director of the Ohio Sea Grant Program and Stone Lab on Put-in-Bay says the No. 1 problem harming Lake Erie is harmful nutrients running off farms into tributaries of the lake.

At issue is phosphorus, he said, which fuels the growth of harmful algal blooms, he said, and the Maumee River pumps four times more phosphorus into the lake than any other tributary.

Nitrogen is a problem because it enhances the toxicity of the blooms.

"I'm really excited about ErieHack," said Reutter, one of the early speakers Tuesday. He hopes the event builds on itself over the years.

The alliance is encouraging people of all stripes -- from industry representatives to watershed managers to elected officials -- to attend the summit at the Global Center for Health Innovation, with tickets ranging from $49 for students, to $109 for government and non-profit attendees, to $159 for industry representatives. The ticket prices do not include processing fees.

Here's who else you can expect:

Jay Famiglietti, a senior water scientist at the NASA Jet Propulsion Lab in California: He'll kick off the summit and focus on the importance of water worldwide and factors that are impacting it. .

Also on Tuesday will be Mads Warming, who works for a Danish company that has helped developed an energy-neutral water cycle: The process treats sewage and converts it to clean water, creating all the electricity it needs to operate.

Eew, right? Water is removed from the sewage, leaving physical waste that is then treated with bacteria, Warming said. The bacteria devours the waste, creating methane gas that can be burned to create electricity to run the system, he said.

What's really special about the process, he said, is the use of computers and sensors to optimize the efficiency of the water system.

Another Tuesday speaker will be Rebekah Eggers, global water leader at IBM, who will address the need for data analytics to better manage the Great Lakes.

Serial Entrepreneur Jeff Hoffman will be the keynote speaker Wednesday morning. He will encourage entrepreneurs to seek technological and business solutions to water challenges.

©2017 Advance Ohio Media, Cleveland Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.