Seeing the Unseen: Satellite Imagery in Water Management

Solomon Vimal from Geothara and Liquid Assets host, Ravi Kurani, discuss Solomon's journey in using satellite imagery and data science to address water security challenges. He shared insights into his experience in high-performance computing and his work in the automotive industry. Solomon explained how his passion for water conservation led him to found Geothara, a data science company focused on developing algorithms and insights for water security. He emphasized the importance of infrastructure design and effective problem-solving in this domain. Throughout the conversation, Solomon highlighted the value of satellite imagery in identifying water resources and optimizing water management strategies.

• 🌍 Satellite imagery and data science can play a crucial role in addressing water security challenges.
• 🚀 Geothara aims to provide insights and algorithms for water security, focusing on infrastructure design problems.
• 💡 Effective problem-solving and clear storytelling are essential in developing a successful startup.
• 🌊 Solomon's work demonstrates the intersection of technology, sustainability, and social impact in the realm of water conservation.

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Meet Solomon

Solomon Vimal is a visionary entrepreneur and data scientist focused on leveraging technology to address global water security challenges. With a background in high-performance computing and experience in the automotive industry, Solomon founded Geothara, a data science company dedicated to optimizing water resource management through innovative algorithms and insights. His work emphasizes the importance of effective problem-solving and clear storytelling in the startup ecosystem, driving meaningful change in the field of water conservation.

The book, movie, or show

We ask everyone on the podcast for their favorite book, movie, or show. This is what Solomon had to say!

How to Solve It by Georg Polya

In the renowned book "How to Solve It" by distinguished mathematician G. Polya, readers from any discipline are taught the art of clear thinking. Polya, with his clear and engaging writing style, illustrates how mathematical methods used for proving theories or finding unknowns can be applied to solve any logical problem, whether it's constructing a bridge or excelling at a game of anagrams. Numerous readers have appreciated Polya's insightful instructions on focusing on the core of the problem and eliminating the unnecessary, guiding them straight to the solution.

Transcript

00:00
Solomon Vimal
Lakes are the sentinels of climate change. You can see them from space. They're just right there. And they have some interesting properties. They're more reflective than other land surface features, so they're more visible from space. So lakes can be really used to understand the amount of water and how it is changing day by day better. So because of my expertise in lakes and because of my customer discovery india, and I kind of understood that water security is more persistent problem on the drought side, that's where I want to start. And specifically, I want to look into infrastructure design problems. By that I mean, really, to build your water security, you need to know where to have your bank account and bank account. By here, I mean dams. Dams are used to store water. The soil and underground aquifers could also be used to store water.

00:48
Solomon Vimal
So really the question is, where do you store it and how do you increase your savings?

00:56
Ravi Kurani
Welcome to another episode of Liquid Assets, where we look at the business of water. We cover everything from policy to management to technology and all kind of how this looks at the world of water.

01:09
Solomon Vimal
Today.

01:10
Ravi Kurani
We have an awesome guest for you.

01:11
Solomon Vimal
I'm solomon wimmel. I'm the founder and CEO of a company called Geothara. Geothera is a company headquartered in new York city. What we do is take advantage of the new generation of satellite imagery to build a water secure future.

01:25
Ravi Kurani
Can you go ahead and kind of introduce yourself, who you are, where you grew up? Would love to get to know you a little bit.

01:30
Solomon Vimal
Okay. Thank you so much for having me here. Ravi. So I am originally from India. I grew up there until my undergraduate education in civil engineering. Then the last decade or so, I've been kind of moving all over the world. So initially I did my education in Europe. I studied through an erasmus mundus fellowship, which is a fellowship from the european commission in four different countries in Europe to pick up three master's degree. And they were all focused on the subject of flood risk management. And right after that, I had a little startup experience, which was india. And I kind of pivoted kind of quickly because we learned that flood risk was not a problem, that supply chains were supply chain disruptions were not people who were interested in heavy manufacturing and supply chain disruptions were not really interested in flood risk because it was very much probabilistic.

02:17
Solomon Vimal
They wanted structural solutions. Instead. They were interested more in persistent problems like water security and droughts and things like that. So I went on to do a PhD in that subject. So I went to California. I was in UCLA until last year when I finished my dissertation, and I worked on how to use satellite imagery to understand climate impacts on lakes. So I analyzed something like 13 million lakes, developed some data science tools, some of them have been patented and now I've just started a company based on those technologies.

02:48
Ravi Kurani
Awesome. Really cool. That's a really interesting journey. There's a few things I actually want touch on. First is getting into the Erasmus program. How is that? Is that a competitive program? I've actually never heard of it, so I'd love to. What is the Erasmus program?

03:04
Solomon Vimal
Yeah, you can think of it as the Fulbright of Europe. Okay. So the European Commission is interested in promoting collaboration between European countries. So until a few years ago, most European countries were doing their science in their own languages. Recently, after the European Union was formed in the 80s or so, they kind of increasingly started to invest European Union wide projects. And obviously because of climate change and various other factors, human development, flood risk is starting to be a heavy cost for Europe broadly. So they try to be a competitive fellowship program similar to the Fulbright, and they try to attract a global pool. So each year they bring about 20 students from 20 different countries. So half the class is usually from European Union and half from outside that, including all other continents, and half of the class is usually guys and half is girls.

03:57
Solomon Vimal
So try to balance across space and also gender. And they have these students hop around European countries to kind of learn complementary things from various universities and then do a thesis in a place of their choice.

04:12
Ravi Kurani
Awesome. And you said that you picked up three master's degrees through this program. How does that work? Was that like a six year program or is it kind of master's degrees within a similar area? And obviously you said flood risk. Right. So kind of how does all that stitch together?

04:27
Solomon Vimal
Yeah, I guess it's technically a little bit of cheating. So master's degrees are usually two years, right. The European Union has this enhancement program that permits joint triple degrees, joint double degrees sometimes. So you do like one semester in a university and that university grants you a full diploma, so technically it's considered a joint triple.

04:52
Ravi Kurani
What is if you break it down, how much is the total time you spent there and how many degrees did you get per time?

04:58
Solomon Vimal
So the total time I spent in Europe was actually a year and a half. The last leg of the program, I could have chosen to be in Europe, but I went to the yeah, so the first three months I was in Germany, so that was one degree. But they award the degree in the end after you finish your thesis. Right. So come together at the end of the program. And the host institution was in the Netherlands, in the city of Delt. So after you defend your dissertation, each of the three universities that are the main partners awards you a degree. And there is a small partner which does not give you a degree, which is in slovenia, and we didn't spend a whole semester there, so it's partly why.

05:36
Ravi Kurani
Last question here. What are the three degrees that you did end up getting?

05:40
Solomon Vimal
Okay, so they're complementary. So the degree in Germany was called hydroscience and engineering. That's a traditional program that they've been offering. They also have a two year degree that's with the same title. In the Netherlands, it was somewhat similar. It was hydro. Informatics and water. Science and engineering. They call it something like that. And the third degree was in Barcelona. And that degree is like, the capstone for the entire program, which is a flood risk management degree.

06:07
Ravi Kurani
Got it. Okay, cool. Kind of moving into the next part of your story that you mentioned where you initially were brought in through the Erasmus program to study flood risk management. Right. And you obviously through your three degrees of hydroscience, the Hydroinformatics and Flood Risk Management, that startup that you had india. Did you start to come up with that idea in Europe? And then you took it to, like, walk us through kind of what that looked like? I think that could be an interesting piece to kind of unwrap. Right. Just given the sense that you also saw that there wasn't necessarily a need for the flood risk management or more persistent problems, as you mentioned, what did that kind of through line look like?

06:52
Solomon Vimal
Yeah, it's actually a very interesting coincidence. So just at the time when I finished that program, sometime in September 2015, I think, so I finished that program, and I spent a few months just hopping around places trying to wrap up my thesis and write a paper about it. And just around that time, there was a huge flood in my hometown in the city of Chennai in the south of India. And this flood was one of the most massive floods that the city has seen. And newspaper reports said something like there was a loss of about five to $6 billion because Chennai is considered the Detroit of Asia, so it's a huge manufacturing hub for automotive sector. So that's part of the reason why they had such a huge economic loss. The interest to start this company in flood risk at that time was actually not my idea.

07:41
Solomon Vimal
So I came with the technical training in floods. Of course, I had learned how the Europeans work with flood risk management all the way from the engineering practice, the modeling and the computation and also policy and all of that. So we understand all the aspects of it from various countries. But I went back to India, actually, before my masters. I had a little stint in Bangalore, which is in the Indian Institute of Science. So there I worked for a year with a professor who was working on floods as well. So he'd been working on urban floods in Bangalore. So my plan was to really go visit them and just say hello and ask them for some perspective on what I could do next in my career. But I was actually just taking a break also because for two years I hadn't come home. And then I was coming home this time with a dramatic entrance with the huge flood in my city and coming to Bangalore to learn how I could make use of my career.

08:34
Solomon Vimal
So that professor actually guided me to start a company. So he put me in touch with somebody who had this interest to start a business in flood risk. And this was a senior person in the tech industry, Dr. Abhishek Bhagna. So he had actually approached that university with the idea that if there is such a huge economic loss, there should be insurance to absorb that loss. So that was his idea and he and I teamed up to write a business proposal later and that's how it started. This is, I think, late 2015 and early 2016.

09:10
Ravi Kurani
Really interesting. One thing I actually do want to unpack is you had mentioned that you kind of learned how Europe does flood risk management. Two questions. One is, can you kind of unpack that? What does flood risk management mean for kind of the audience out there that doesn't understand what that is? And then kind of second question is what is the delta between what Europe does and what does India do? What is the discrepancy in what you saw that you then saw a need?

09:41
Solomon Vimal
Yeah, I love that question. So this is absolutely something that shocks you. So just before I went to Europe in 2013, there was the Uttarkan flood, right? So I just got accepted to the European program. I was going to study floods and I had a little break before I was going to board the flight. My first travel to Europe, I was very excited. And just around that time, the Uttarkan flood happened india. And this I think estimates vary quite a lot and real number we don't really know. But I think the ballpark is around 10,000 people who died in the northern part of India. So I did some volunteering work around that time with some student volunteers, tried to understand how could you use your knowledge to help on the ground. Then I go to Europe. So my first semester was in Germany and in Know, Germany is known for technology, right?

10:25
Solomon Vimal
And specifically india you have a high reputation for German engineers. So in the first semester there, I got introduced to all the engineering classes and so on. And they also took us to various field trips. They took us to the Zilt Sea in the North Sea in a little town called Zilt Sylt. And this is a little town of about 300 people or so. And they were showing us some of the infrastructure investments that they've made to protect the island from getting eroded because of sea level rise and so on. So simply the economics, the amount of infrastructure investment in flood risk mitigation in Germany was shocking to me. It was something in the order of hundreds of millions of dollars in a little island of 300 people, whereas india you have 10,000 people die and we really don't know what to do about it.

11:10
Solomon Vimal
Right. So that was a glaring contrast. So obviously, with all of that in mind, it's not that India does not have the technology. Indian Institute of Science, for example, probably one of the best in the world, like, trying to develop new solutions for the technology side of things, technology and science side of things, how to do predictive models and so on. But obviously, I think on the infrastructure side, india has the capability to do more and also the need because of the sheer volume of people we have and the losses we have. But yeah, I was really moved by those experiences. The Uttarkhan flood in the beginning and the Chennai flood in the end.

11:43
Ravi Kurani
In the end. Oh, my gosh. Your entire European study was basically bookended by two different floods, leaving from and coming back home.

11:50
Solomon Vimal
Exactly. Yeah.

11:52
Ravi Kurani
Crazy. And when you kind of learned how much money Germany puts into infrastructure, europe puts into infrastructure around floodplain or flood risk mitigation, walk us through what your business model was.

12:07
Solomon Vimal
Right.

12:07
Ravi Kurani
What were you trying to sell? What was the product? In India, you had mentioned that you're working with this professor, and obviously if there's some sort of loss, there should be insurance. Was this thing like an insurance product? What exactly were you building?

12:21
Solomon Vimal
Yeah, so I was 22 years old, and I had never been around people who were in any way associated with startups before. So I was very naive and I really had no idea what a startup was. Of course, I knew in principle what it was, but obviously Abhishek was really very senior. He, at that time, already had some almost a decade of experience working in executive roles at Google in California, and he came with really stellar experience. Like, he had worked directly with the executives of Google, like Larry Page and Sergey Abhishek's experience and how to think about strategically a startup was really inspiring to me. I was really, like, jaw dropped by his thinking and his I wouldn't say ambition, it's really just let's do like he was really very energetic about how you can really make a plan and go and execute. So with Abhishek leading the way.

13:17
Solomon Vimal
But also, he was also given an offer to join Facebook right after. Right. So I was housed in the Indian Institute of Science, which was the incubator for our idea. So we wrote a business plan with Abhishek writing the strategy part and me writing the technical parts, and we submitted to IASC, and they really liked it. And one of the challenges I had with understanding the market was I had trained myself in floods for two years. Right. And then with Abhishek, were doing lots of conversations on the ground. We were talking to some of these automotive companies that have supply chain disruptions. And what we learned was, as were going, it looked like flood was really a big loss. But the flood, by definition, it happens for two or three days in a year. When it strikes, it really is very disruptive, but it's not persistent.

14:07
Solomon Vimal
But many of these companies actually said they were interested more in groundwater, so they wanted to know if we could help them with water security, which is like droughts and water quality at the other end of that curve. So it is also a hydrologic extreme. It also is impacted by climate change. But it was not a subject that I was trained to do right. So my expertise was entirely in floods. Although I could have learned how to deal with it, I felt like it was not my cup of tea and I didn't know how to directly pivot and learn the technology for groundwater. That's one of the reasons why I could not pursue what we learned from the market. And the Indian market was not ready for really using flood risk models and so on from a startup. Then what I also learned as were writing the business proposal, I was learning about the landscape of companies that exist in flood risk.

14:59
Solomon Vimal
And there were these gigantic companies like catastrophe risk insurance companies with 30 years of experience in flood modeling. And they were obviously on the computation side, a notch above academia. And I had also gained some experience in the US. I did my master thesis in the US. And I'd seen quite a lot of forecasting tools and computational tools in the US. Which really is like maybe a notch above Europe in terms of how much infrastructure exists for computation. I wouldn't say generally European Union, because there are forecasting centers in European Union that are also comparable, but generally compared to individual European countries. The American infrastructure was so good. So india, and because I had already worked indian Institute of Science, I knew about some of the computational challenges ASE Bangalore has one of the largest supercomputers in the know, maybe even in Asia, maybe the second in Asia or so.

15:56
Solomon Vimal
But still, simply because of the volume of India, you have to wait in queues. Sometimes you have to wait for two months before you get access to submit your job to get the result. Whereas in us I had worked in Texas for a little bit and they had something called TAC. I had access to something like 10,000 processors and I could run codes in like ten minutes, and I was given an access to it in like two days or something. So simply, that also surprised me, really coming back to India, coming back to the reality of access to software infrastructure. So with all of that and also not having enough experience and lack of knowledge in groundwater. I really needed to know if this is the right time to get into the startup. And so I just chose to do a PhD in that moment, focusing on the other side that I learned was important in the long term.

16:45
Ravi Kurani
Got it. Really interesting. Man so you pick up three masters. You do this flood management studying in Europe, go to India, invalidate the idea or the fact that you would not be able to actually execute the idea, and then you go and get a PhD. I want to actually pause there for a second, and I want to dig into the PhD. But while we're hot on this topic of the startup that you had india, if you could, two bullet points you said Abhishek worked with and Larry at Google. What are two startup bullet points that you took away? What would you say are like? Man abhishek taught me these two things.

17:26
Solomon Vimal
Be fearless in thinking big. That's one thing for sure. Being very energetic and excited about what were doing. So I would say those are the two things. They were very contagious. It really felt like it was very exciting to work with them.

17:41
Ravi Kurani
I love that. Be fearless and be energetic. I like that a lot.

17:47
Solomon Vimal
Cool.

17:48
Ravi Kurani
Let's jump into the PhD now. So you interviewed these folks in the auto world, and you obviously figured out that they were more interested in the drought prevention, figuring out how they can get groundwater. You ended up not wanting to do that, and so you ended up getting a PhD. Did you get the PhD india? Walk us through kind of what happened there and what you studied.

18:11
Solomon Vimal
Okay, so my PhD was broadly in the subject of lake modeling. So I was given a challenge by the professor on using this large piece of software that was built over multiple decades called the WICC model, the variable infiltration capacity model. So it's a macroscale model that is meant to simulate various hydrological states. So basically, soil moisture evaporation rates, the amount of runoff that happens in the surface, amount of flow that happens in various levels of the soil. It's a very involved model that tries to simulate various pieces of the water system, and it's designed to run at a very large scale, so at a continental scale also. So my challenge was to work with that model and understand first its workings, the organizing principles, the data, and so on, and also to develop some aspects of it to model lakes better. So specifically, there was a project that was funded by NASA to run the model over some millions of lakes in Canada and try to understand what would happen because of climate change in these lakes.

19:23
Solomon Vimal
Because the Arctic is known to be warming at much faster rate than the global average. So in the northern fringes of the Arctic, the rate of warming is like seven times global average. And pan Arctic, if you aggregate it's probably a little more than twice the global. So the Arctic is one of the most sensitive places, and also it's the cryosphere where things are frozen in some parts for the entire year, in some parts for part of the year. And because water in its frozen state, when it melts, right, it starts to absorb energy. So when it's frozen and there's ice and snow, it reflects all the energy. But when it melts, it absorbs all the energy, so it will accelerate. And that explains why it's also warming at a faster rate, right? That physically explains why it's warming at a faster rate. So that's the problem I was trying to figure out what is the exact magnitude of warming and how does that affect the lakes of that entire continent of North American Arctic?

20:24
Ravi Kurani
Wow. Super interesting. And this Vic model, is that something that's proprietary to the US and NASA or something? Or is it just like an open source model that anybody can get access to?

20:34
Solomon Vimal
It is an open source model. So there are many websites where you have copies of this model and there are some branches of this model different groups in the world have been working on. Yeah, it is publicly available and most hydrologic models are publicly available. However, there is a part of my thing that I actually skipped over. So between my startup experience and my PhD start, I actually spent a year working for a catastrophe risk insurance company there's, an American company. And so I worked with them. They were actually one of the competitors in my business plan when I had the startup. But they had just at that moment an interest to work on India floods. The timing explains is already explained, right? So Chennai floods just happened a few years earlier. Uttarkhan flood happened, and then there was also a big one in Mumbai a few years before that, I think.

21:23
Solomon Vimal
So India was just ready to pay for these flood risk models and this company was trying to build India flood model for the first time. And many other catastrophe risk insurance companies were doing that in Asia and also india. So I worked with them for eleven months. And I mentioned this now because the models that are built in these contexts in the private sector are not public, they are proprietary models. So I also understood what is available in the proprietary world and what is available in the public world. And there's a huge difference there too.

21:55
Ravi Kurani
And what is that difference? If you were to kind of explain what is the difference between a proprietary and the public models?

22:02
Solomon Vimal
Yeah, so I mentioned this earlier that this flood risk insurance industry is quite a mature industry with 30 years of experience. So this company basically has the ability to build something over time, whereas in academia, things are built on soft money. So a PhD student comes in, spends two, three years learning how to work with the code. One year later, leaves the group postdoc, comes in for a grant money takes two, three years to learn the program, writes maybe one paper and then goes away. So in the academic world, unfortunately, model building is very much on soft money and there are few exceptions. There are national labs that do support persistently a few models, and this is not weak model is not one of them. There are a few national lab models that are developed in various national labs. I don't know exactly which ones, but I'm sure PNNL has one.

22:59
Solomon Vimal
I'm sure Lawrence Livermore Berkeley lab has one.

23:02
Ravi Kurani
Sure. It's actually kind of interesting you say that, right? Because you would imagine that academia has the power of the globe technically, right, because you have academics around the world that are working on this problem, whereas one private company would have only such a limited scope in what they do. But it's interesting you say that, because the very fragmentation that should lend itself to actually building a stronger model ends up being academia's demise, right, in this example. And so if there almost was a way to stitch together all these things through like a similar architecture or an infrastructure, it could be maybe interesting because you could then actually take the power of all these people that are working around the world versus it being so fragmented.

23:49
Solomon Vimal
Yeah. Another thing I would say is I wouldn't use the word power with academia because I think the incentives are misaligned. Right. So the incentives are completely different in academia. The main incentive is novelty. The scientists and academics are incentivized for creating new and new work. Sometimes to do the tough work, you have to do boring and simple work, right? It's not going to be exciting. It's going to be just a simple improvement. But that's the challenge. Sometimes really doing things that are not novel at all is really the problem in the private sector. Obviously, they have different incentives, right. They are trying to understand the market and they're trying to understand regulations. And I think part of the reason why these companies were entering the India market at that time was that Indian government was open to foreign companies only in those years. So there are different incentives and trigger points that kind of get people going in these different areas.

24:51
Solomon Vimal
So they're not really comparable at all. But yeah, each have their strengths and sure.

24:58
Ravi Kurani
And that kind of actually raises an interesting question too, just around incentives. When you go back to that conversation were having of the European Union having infrastructure around flood risk india, not is there an incentives issue there? Where does that money come from? Or is it the fact that the city just understands that they need this? Who is the quote unquote, buyer of this infrastructure? And I guess where is that incentive?

25:26
Solomon Vimal
Yeah, I think I can give you a little bit about the US. So it's been a while since I was in Europe, so I've almost forgotten a little bit. But US is on top of my mind because I'm thinking about public infrastructure in the US. A lot these days. So let me take the comparison of US. And India. Right. Water is basically considered a public good, and basically America has a policy that everything that's done with tax based money has to be public information. Most countries try to follow that same rule, but US basically does that better. So there's a lot more transparency in where money comes from, where it goes, and how it is used for infrastructure. In India, unfortunately, this is not the case, or at least it's not accessible, or at least I've not accessed it yet. I've tried looking for it, but maybe there is a process.

26:14
Solomon Vimal
Indian constitution is very strong, and I'm sure there is some process. They're probably putting a bulletin board on an obscure government office somewhere that you can't reach. There's that difference. So from a scientist point of view, you have a better understanding of what's going on with infrastructure more directly in the US. And you have to work your way up to figure out where it is, what the equivalent is india. But in terms of public, you know, India is a very rich country these days, and there's a lot of investment infrastructure. And I was so shocked to hear about some of the investment in software infrastructure. So the Central Water Commission of the Indian government invested something in the order of $5 billion only to build a website to put data. So this is like an informatics project, something of that order. It shocked me. But also, I've tried examining these websites, the data sets.

27:10
Solomon Vimal
Sometimes usability is a challenge, so you sometimes don't see the result. But also the scale is different, and India is in a different stage of its growth. So you can't really see how much of that is spent, how much of this is going to be spent. Where did that money really go, you're not able to trace entirely with the US. I think things are a little more transparent, in my opinion. So that's the big difference.

27:34
Ravi Kurani
Interesting. And let's kind of switch gears a little bit and move to what you're working on, the US. I know you looked at 13 million lakes at UCLA. You worked with the Vic database to kind of figure out what's happening with these lakes in the US. And in Canada. What are you working on? Now, I know we talked about this a little bit before, but for the audience out there, explain to us kind of what your project is.

27:59
Solomon Vimal
Okay, my startup okay. So my company is called Geothara, and I put a lot of thought into this word because Geo is like geospatial data, and. Tara is a Tamil word and also it's a word in Sanskrit that means several things, including data. Tara which means quality, and Tara also means stars. And there are also Indian goddesses named Tara. So there are so many things that are really nice references that comes together in that word. So I just wanted to call my company Geothara. So it's basically a company that's trying to be a data science company that provides services in water security. So today we're in a very interesting time. So we are at the cusp of just privatization of satellite data that's going to blow. It's going to skyrocket to a way humanity is not ready yet. So up until now, we had a lot of satellite data and private satellite data, but never before have we had transparent pricing for enterprise use, right?

29:02
Solomon Vimal
So only in the last, say, half a year or so, there is a clear cost for what imagery costs and the trade offs, right? What is the spatial resolution and so on. So more and more businesses will start using this data from going forward. So I think people are now ready to use geospatial data. And recently Google's, google also, of course, has one of the strongest teams in geo. So they have built Google Map. Everybody uses that. Nobody uses any other I've not heard of any person use any other map but Google Maps. So obviously they've invested quite heavily in building a very good software infrastructure for and Google has also built what is called the Google Earth engine, right? This is a cloud platform that basically brings in data from all the public data sources for various satellite agencies. So almost anybody can go online or to Google Earthajun website and write a couple of lines of JavaScript.

30:00
Solomon Vimal
Or you can also do it in Python with an API and instantly analyze petabytes of data instantly. So everybody has access to the data today. And this is not the most high resolution private data, this is the public data. But still, look at the resolution, it's kind of shocking how much information is available. So Jiotara is really positioning itself to be a data science company that develops algorithms and insights for water security in.

30:26
Ravi Kurani
This very exciting, really cool. I actually did not know this about the Google Geo team. That's super cool. And so let's unpack a few things that you said around water security. What are the verticals that you focus on? Is like flood risk one of them, I'm assuming, or what is encapsulated within the Geothara definition of what is water security?

30:49
Solomon Vimal
So I'm sure water security means its own thing in the broader academic world, but my definition of water security is just my own. And I simply view it as people's dependence on water, on whether it is in abundance or in deficit. Right? So being able to manage that effectively is water security done well. So simply, just like financial security, you have an income, you have an expense, you have storage in your bank and that gives your financial security. And you have to think about not overspending, earning well to kind of keep your savings growing and stable. So that's basically what water security is for me. And obviously this has two pieces. It's got floods one side and droughts on the other side. I'm starting with droughts and some of the tools that I've developed. And because I studied lakes are a direct signature of water under the ground as well.

31:51
Solomon Vimal
They're almost like there is a term that scientists like to use a lot. It's almost overused. I can't even hear it anymore. It's the word sentinel. The lakes are the sentinels of climate change. They say you can see them from space because they're just right there and they have some interesting properties. They're more reflective than other land surface features, so they're more visible from space. So lakes can be really used to understand the amount of water and how it is changing day by day better. So because of my expertise in lakes and because of my customer discovery india, and I kind of understood that water security is more persistent problem on the drought side. That's where I want to start. And specifically I want to look into infrastructure design problems. By that I mean, really to build your water security, you need to know where to have your bank account and bank account by here I mean dams, right?

32:46
Solomon Vimal
Dams are used to store water. The soil and underground aquifers could also be used to store water. So really the question is, where do you store it and how do you increase your savings so that you can manage? When you have surplus, store it. When you have deficit, use it. How do you effectively do that? That's the challenge I want to kind of go after.

33:04
Ravi Kurani
Wow, super interesting. And the way to figure out where to have this bank account right, where to store your bank. The lakes are kind of like the input signal to figure out how that's done on kind of a geographic basis. Or you obviously would use the lakes as one part of many other variables that you're digging into.

33:25
Solomon Vimal
Yeah, so lakes can be a good proxy, but we have direct measurements of soil moisture as well. There are satellite instruments that specifically measure soil moisture and there are some really cool satellite sensors that can even measure underground water simply using the gravity of the so this is a really surprising maybe I should share it. So there is a NASA mission called Grace. I don't know the abbreviation, but it's got something to do with using so there are two satellites that move next to each other and both of them are checking the gravity on the Earth with a little difference between them. And just by looking at the difference between two positions and as they move, they're able to work out what is the weight of water under the ground, because water is the only mass that moves on the Earth at a quantity that can be measured by the amount of gravity that changes.

34:19
Solomon Vimal
So that's a fascinating fact. And scientists were able to work out the sensitivity of the instrument to actually measure that. And you'll be surprised by the accuracy of that measurement. It's something in the order of centimeters. Would you believe that? So water shift in order of centimeters vertically can be measured by gravity from space. But the only way to I mean, it's kind of absurd to think it's been centimeters. But what explains that is that it's measured over a large scale. So because it's flying so far away and is measuring from even a little difference, there is like a large is a large difference.

34:57
Ravi Kurani
Yeah.

34:57
Solomon Vimal
The actual resolution on the ground would be very large. It would be more than the size of a city or so. It's approximately 250 by 250 believe so. Over that scale, though, and there are thousands of those boxes, you can draw on the Earth, you can measure fluctuation water levels to the levels of centimeters. So that gives you a really good understanding of how the water system is changing. And tools I've developed, of course, tools that I've developed are very generic data science tools that can detect change over time. So one of the first things that I'm thinking about patterning right now, and I have a couple of provisional patterns currently underway, figuring out licensing deals with universities and figuring out also market needs and so on. So these two patterns that I'm currently working on have to do with detecting a changing signature in a time series that is always fluctuating.

35:49
Solomon Vimal
So this is not a trivial problem. You would think understanding how something changes just fit a line through a bunch of changing points, and then you get the answer. But it's not so simple. It's very challenging problem. In fact, I spent two years working on that problem, did like millions of simulations, had to collaborate with a mathematician. Actually, he started as a mathematician, but he's an economist, applied mathematician. I had to work with him a couple of years and write thousands of lines of code, millions of simulations to really make improvements to detecting the signature of change. But after a lot of work, were able to build something that is superior to what we have today by quite a margin. And I'm able to kind of detect climate signature on hydrologic time series. So hydrologic time series is always fluctuating, and I'm able to see the underlying signal that's a systematic shift from a previous condition to a new condition.

36:47
Ravi Kurani
Wow, that is so cool. I'm not going to lie. Solomon, we spoke earlier, but now that you're explaining it, this is super interesting. Really cool. And so when you have this more accurate way of measuring hydrological shift. You can look at kind of focusing on drought prevention, where to have this bank, who are your customers, you're selling these to cities, to governments, to states. What does your sales process look like?

37:17
Solomon Vimal
Yeah, actually I think I diverged a little bit. So were talking about who owns dams, who's going to pay earlier, so went somewhere else. But coming back to that question, thank you for bringing us back.

37:29
Ravi Kurani
Sure.

37:30
Solomon Vimal
Yeah. So dams in the US. I know more about the US dam market than anything else because this is the first time I'm exiting like the ivory tower of Academy and learning about the real world. So in the US. There are 90,000 dams and they are owned by every combination you can think of. Sometimes there are private dam owners, there are joint dam owners, and there are public utilities that own dams and so on. So the arc structure of all of these dam agencies could be very different. And US Army Corps manages some dams, bureau of Reclamation manages some dams. Sometimes there are private dam owners that manage them. And of these 90,000 dams, some 2700 dams generate power. And what we've recently learned is that there's going to be less and less dependence on coal and natural gas and more dependence on renewable sources of energy.

38:24
Solomon Vimal
But unfortunately, wind and solar are not persistent, so dams can generate power throughout the day. Wind and solar are going to be very going to be fluctuating all the time, although dams will fluctuate throughout the year, but not at a given time. So there is this trade off to work out, but because only 2700 dams, they generate power, and soon among the 90,000, more will be generating power, all these users of all these kinds of dams are going to kind of figure out how to use these dams as batteries for storage. So this is the area where I'm trying to focus my attention for my market, right? So trying to understand the landscape of these ownership and maybe not directly work with dams, but perhaps one step removed. Large engineering companies that provide services to dams. So it's a slightly easier place to start for startups because obviously big companies have an advantage.

39:16
Solomon Vimal
They understand the regulatory process very well, the proposal RFP process very well. And as a startup and having nobody with domain knowledge of the US. Market, it's quite difficult to directly work with utilities for me. So I've learned in a kind of a study rate that I initially started with utilities, then went to small engineering companies, and now I'm thinking about large engineering companies. Hope that answers your question.

39:45
Ravi Kurani
Yeah, no, it's always very interesting to learn about the sales process, right, because water is especially in this series and on this podcast, water is used by so many different people, so many different organizations, and there's so much different types of ownership across the board.

40:02
Solomon Vimal
Right.

40:02
Ravi Kurani
And so finding the right customer of who is going to buy a service or a product that you're selling, especially for a startup or for a business, is just so important and so interesting to kind of see the way that you through your Iterative design process, through actually interviewing people to figuring out kind of what they're interested in. It totally makes sense, right? Looking at large engineering companies versus the owners of the dams might be a better place to start, definitely from a startup perspective, than if you were to start somewhere else entirely.

40:36
Solomon Vimal
I'm still figuring out so there are so many applications to this technology, right. It's a basic tool to interpret data better, but sometimes it's better if you're able to package that with a decision that you already make for them. So I'm trying to figure out what is the right combination of things to provide that will be most attractive to this market and very much I'm in the early stage. I just finished my PhD last year and I just started an incubator program. Maybe we could talk about that a little.

41:05
Ravi Kurani
Yeah, yeah, entirely. Let's go ahead and jump into so.

41:09
Solomon Vimal
I finished my PhD at UCLA, and this was summer last year, and I did a three month incubator program accelerator program in UCLA. It's called Startup UCLA. So the Startup UCLA program's emphasis was really to be able to tell a very clear story. And I was just out of university and my story, I knew quite clearly what I wanted to do, but I didn't know how to tell that story well. So they helped me quite a lot to get to some clarity. So I spent three months doing some limited customer discovery, a little bit of product development, a little bit of IP development, IP protection, and so on, and quite a bit of pitch coaching to get to some clarity in those three months. Then right after that, I am very actually lucky to join Cornell University. So Cornell University has a new campus in New York City.

42:02
Solomon Vimal
So Cornell itself has its reputation. It's in a little city called ithaka north of New York City. But in New York City, there's a new campus of Cornell called Cornell Tech that is jointly owned by a university in Israel, Technion and Cornell. So the emphasis of Cornell Tech is I think there's a very interesting story about Cornell Tech, and there is a nice Wikipedia article that tells the story. But it was founded about a decade ago, and the mayor of the city of that time, Bloomberg, had donated a little piece of New York, a little island called Roosevelt Island that's just beside Manhattan, to any university that would help New York recover from some of the stock market crash economic losses. So many universities wanted to bid for that proposal to get that investment from the city to build a university that would be tech and business fusion.

43:01
Solomon Vimal
So Cornell Tech has a few computer science programs and a few business programs, I believe. And they also do a bunch of incubator style programs as well. So they have two incubators. One is called the Runway postdoc program, and the other is called the Spinout program. Spin out is for master students who study at Cornell to form a little team with their classmates to kind of create a company. And Runway is for recent graduates of PhD from any part of the world to try to convert their technologies into something that can be part of. Because I just finished my PhD. I'm part of this Runway Startup Postdoc program, and it's a very friendly, entrepreneur friendly program that gives you it's called Runway because it gives you a really long runway. So traditional incubators are very short. Y Combinator, for example, is only some ten weeks or so, perhaps three months.

43:56
Solomon Vimal
I'm not very sure.

43:57
Ravi Kurani
I think it's three months.

43:58
Solomon Vimal
Yeah. So the Runway program is, like, two years long, and to develop something that is reliable, I'm thinking about infrastructure, water security. You cannot build test break like in software engineering, right? You can't just show it to a lot of customers. You've got to go with tools that work, like working with a surgeon. You've got to come with precision. You've got to come with some clarity. The development cycle for a company, like, of my kind is not going to be order weeks. It's going to be order months or years at least. So for that reason, I applied to this program, and I'm very happy to be here because it simultaneously leverages the skills of Cornell and Techneon. So outside Silicon Valley, Technion has a reputation for being very good at creating big companies, really successful and creative. And I've been in this program for nine months, and I just signed my contract to continue for the second year, and I'm really enjoying it.

45:00
Solomon Vimal
So in the beginning of the program, they gave us a little MBA. They call it the startup MBA. It's like a crash course introduction to how to kick startup business, teach you everything from legal to finance and so on. So I learned some of theory, and doing a PhD obviously helps you learn very fast, so you take lots of notes. But for now, I have, like, 100 things to learn about. So I have to really put my brakes am I learning breaks? And then try to start doing things that are focused on a market. So that's where I am. But also I'm developing new technologies, right? So one of the strengths of the Cornell program is they encourage us to diversify our patent portfolio, and they also provide legal support to kind of do the right type of IP and IP portfolio diversification. So I'm working with some of the IP attorneys of Cornell to understand what that means for me.

45:54
Solomon Vimal
And I'm also exploring some non dilutive grant funding through various university collaborations. So I'm working with Cornell Purdue University and some others to try to figure out what are the things that can truly differentiate me. So I've been in academia so long, and I know some open, unsolved problems, so I'm trying to create patterns around areas where I can create a solution. I've diversified my pattern portfolio a little bit. The climate signature tool I mentioned is one of just the first one. There are two other areas. Perhaps that's too much information for this.

46:28
Ravi Kurani
Sure, yeah. I mean, I think, honestly, what I would love to do and one of the things I'm thinking about doing is actually having a re up series with a lot of the folks that are especially in startups because they move so quickly. Right. And so I think we should definitely do another episode in like, six months or so, six to eight months to see kind of where you've come, what new things you have, and yeah, I think that'd be really cool. We're getting really close to time. So there's actually one last question that I always ask every one of my interviewees that I have, and that is there a particular book or TV show or movie since the beginning that has kind of, like, really impacted the way that you think? Or it could even be one that you're watching right now or reading right now?

47:12
Solomon Vimal
So book I'll go with book. There is a book that became my bible for problem solving. It was written in 1950 or some year around that time by a mathematician by the name George Polia, and the book is titled how to Solve It. So it's a very general book that he claims that is applicable to any field. Like, although it is meant for math education, there's a book that teaches teachers how to teach math and problem solving. So it lays out very clearly a blueprint for the heuristics of problem solving that mathematicians have figured out over millennia. Right. If you look at any subject, math is one subject that has remained math for millennia. Right. No other subject has that. Maybe politics, geography, but math has remained and built on top of previous knowledge. So he really did an incredible job curating the knowledge of millennia into that little book that's full of nuggets.

48:16
Solomon Vimal
So it has, like, 63 nuggets on how to apply heuristics of problem solving so that you don't run in circles. So I actually came across that book when I really had a very tough problem that I could not solve. So thinking very deeply about a challenge with the WICC model and trying to figure out in Canada, you have no data. Like, there's a lot of noisy data. They've stopped measuring things with gauges in the north, satellite instruments are full of errors and so on. So I had certain difficulties in figuring out getting a clear understanding of the problem. So that's when I came across that book, because I went and Googled how to Solve really difficult problems. And that book popped up on the top or something like that. Awesome.

48:59
Ravi Kurani
So how to solve it?

49:01
Solomon Vimal
Yeah. How to solve it? So it's a book I highly recommend. It helped me really clarify my thinking and really dig very deep, and it also helped me break out of chasing your tail kind of situation.

49:14
Ravi Kurani
Sure. Cool. I'll definitely have to check it out. Awesome. Well, I want to say thank you, Solomon, for joining us. And for everybody else out there, thank you for listening to Liquid Assets. You can find us wherever you find your podcast. Be that. On Apple, on Google, on Spotify. You can also find us at liquidassets.cc. Solomon, thanks again for joining us.

49:35
Solomon Vimal
Thank you. Ravi here.