Deanna in front of Memorial Union, University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Deanna (Left 2) and her classmates in the English class in the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Deanna (Right 4) with her supervisor, Prof. Volker Radeloff, (Left 5 at the back) and labmates from the Silvis Lab at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Photo of Deanna (Left 2) and her LSGI classmate (HUNG Ling Sum, Jenny) (Left 1) with other students in a trip to Hamburg through international exchange to Technische Universität München.
Photo of Deanna (Right 4) with students in a trip to Salzburg.
“Engaging this new generation of water leaders and connecting them with a bigger platform to make global impact is critical. We’re energized by the insight, ingenuity, and ambition so many students have brought to this challenge.”
This justifies why the young innovators from 78 Countries were coming together joining hands in hands to illuminate ideas to develop new solutions to world’s water challenges in an international competition.
“The water issues of today and tomorrow won’t be solved by simply doing things the same way they've always been done. Solving today’s greatest water challenges demands innovative ideas and fresh approaches,” Patrick Decker, President and CEO of Xylem, said.
Deanna,Yi Nam XU, the recipient of Outstanding Student Award of Faculty of Construction and Environment (FCE) 2022 as well as the recipient of the Innovation and Technology Scholarship 2022 (offered by Innovation and Technology Commission of the HKSAR Government, HSBC and The Hong Kong Federation of Youth Groups), embarked on a journey as a representative of Hong Kong in The Ocean Rescuers Team from India, Hong Kong, and Pakistan to identify, map, and propose a solution for a waterway impacted by plastic pollution, which enabled her and her team to win the 2023 grand prize in the tertiary (university) category. Congrats to Deanna Yi Nam Xu! “Our project developed a detailed scoring system to identify and rank high-risk plastic pollution sites in India,” noted the team. “But our approach has universal relevance. It can be applied to other regions to identify pollution hot spots and develop effective, targeted solutions.”
“The Ocean Rescuers team had a very systematic and comprehensive approach,” said Chiara Lucia Tregnago, member of the Engineering Leadership Development Program (currently in Product Management) and head of the 2023 Xylem Ignite Global Student Innovation Challenge. “They took this problem, fully broke it down, and then proceeded step-by-step in a really structured and sophisticated way to solve it. It was thorough, creative, and easy to follow and understand. And they tackled all the different aspects in the complex challenge statement.”
Deanna Yi Nam XU, who won the 2023 grand prize in the World’s Water Challenges, was being interviewed about what the big challenge was and what could be gained from the challenge.
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Q: What was the most challenging part about the competition?
Deanna: The hardest part was how to assign different scores to each dump site… to develop a formula or grading system to rank the highest or most serious dump sites. We tried different methods as this was not our expertise. We spent some time researching online about how to calculate the scores in order to be more objective. That’s how we found we can use some codes to automatically assign different weights and consider different factors, or that some factors may have higher weight. Through this iterative process, we eventually got the final scoring and selected our final dump sites in India.
Q: What did you learn from the Challenge?
Deanna: You will really grow a lot after participating in this challenge. You learn more skills like how to communicate with different team members or how to deal with data science. You need to know how to collect the data – this is real data not imaginary figures. You are utilizing real data that may be helpful or useful in terms of suggesting a practical solution.
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Aspired young innovators from 78 countries including Deanna Yi Nam XU to develop solutions to the World Water’s Challenge highlight the responsibilities of worldwide youngsters to solve the global issues in concerted efforts. Our future is theirs! Congrats to Deanna Yi Nam XU from LSGI and her international peers win the 2023 Grand Prize of the World’s Water Challenge!
