The Julian Hinds Award is named after the designer of the Hoover Dam in the USA. Since 1974, the Environmental and Water Resources Institute of the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) has annually given out this award to recognize people who made meritorious contributions to the field of water resources development.

Dragan Savic received this prize for “his leadership in the development and application of hydroinformatic tools, particular in the modeling, optimization, and management of water resources, water distribution and sewage systems, resulting in substantial cost savings for utilities worldwide.” KWR took the prize as occasion for an interview with Prof. Savic. Some insights he gave are outlined below.

Promoting the use and development of AI tools

Savic began working with AI and computers early in his career, back in the late 1980s. “When I started my Ph.D., I had to take some exams outside my civil engineering department. I chose computer science and, by chance, enrolled in an AI course. At the time, AI was very different—quite rudimentary compared to what we see today. Over the years, I’ve developed and applied various AI tools in the water sector. My biggest challenge has always been convincing others of the need to further develop and adopt AI and hydroinformatics in real-world applications.”

Augmented intelligence and specialized agents

Today, AI is thriving, with large language models being applied across countless domains. In Savic’ eyes, AI can do much more than write emails or generate basic codes: “There is a much deeper kind of ability we can use; we could, for instance, automate quite a lot of thinking and analysis.”

However, he makes clear that he is not interested in AI replacing humans, but he believes in combining human and artificial intelligence—what is called augmented intelligence.

To his opinion, the next big leap probably is agentic AI—specialized agents trained for specific data tasks. These agents could run simulation models in a way a human expert would do or help unstock knowledge from stored databases.

“In a way, water and AI are similar to me: both should be publicly available resources, but unfortunately, in this world, we find ourselves needing to deal with privatisation and commercialisation.””

Professor Dragan Savic is a founder and former director of the Centre for Water Systems at the University of Exeter, UK.  He is the UK’s first Professor of Hydroinformatics having held this post at the University of Exeter since 2001. He is a former CEO of KWR Water Research Institute. Currently, he serves as the Global Advisor on Digital Sciences at KWR.