IWA World Water Congress & Exhibition 2026 · Glasgow · Workshop WS 4.1
Build AI agents for water management.
A hands-on workshop. Bring a laptop, leave with an agent that reads your data and runs your models.
- Branko KerkezDigital Water Lab, University of Michigan
- Amy PrudenPruden Laboratory, Virginia Tech
- WhenMonday 5 October 2026
10:30 to 12:00 - WhereRoom F, SEC GlasgowRoom subject to change
- BringA laptop with WiFi
and a colleague to pair with
Planning to attend? Let us know.
We will send setup instructions and the workshop materials ahead of time, plus any room or schedule changes. Nothing else.
Who it is for
Anyone who plans, designs, or operates water systems and wants to see what an AI agent can do with their own data and models. No programming experience is required: if a task can be described to a colleague, it can be described to an agent. Participants work in pairs, so one working laptop per pair is enough.
What you will learn
How to direct an agent, in plain language, to analyze a real monitoring record and show what happened.
How to have it set up and run a water model, and turn that run into a tool you keep.
How to connect it to live data and to your own models and systems, through the Model Context Protocol (MCP).
Where the person stays in the loop: what such a system should, and should not, be allowed to do on its own.
Before you arrive
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Ideally
Install Claude Code or Codex.
Either Claude Code (Anthropic) or Codex (OpenAI). Both need an account with a paid plan or a few dollars of API credit. Install it, sign in, and confirm that a question gets an answer.
-
At minimum
Have a Google account.
If nothing can be installed on your laptop, you can still take part through Google Colab in the browser, which is free.
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Optional
Bring something of your own.
A standard or procedure you use at work, and a spreadsheet of data you care about. Part of the session is swapping our example for yours.