Will is WaterSmart’s seriously impressive Head Data Scientist. Will joined the team back in April of 2014, the early days of WaterSmart. Five years and roughly sixty water efficiency studies later, Will has made a massive impact on the water industry, our utility partners, and the WaterSmart platform.


Will works tirelessly to analyze data in order to develop new products and facilitate more informed decision making. He recently built a dedicated analytics database that allows him to easily answer questions related to product adoption, customer engagement, and water industry trends. “As our list of utility partners has grown over the past five years, it has been really fascinating to dig into the data and surface insights that both drive our product development and identify valuable insights for utility management best practices” remarks Will.

WaterSmart’s vast, unmatched data lake has inspired a number of interesting projects, the most recent being a Daily Leak Alerting algorithm. Will applied a Machine Learning model (Extreme Gradient Boosting) that uses confirmed hourly leaks to predict when a daily consumption value is actually a leak for a given account. This project is particularly interesting for the many utilities that have already implemented or are currently in the process of implementing AMI in their service areas. “The increasing pace of AMI adoption in the industry is quite exciting! Interval data opens so many doors for improved analysis at both the individual customer and aggregate utility level.”

But Will is crunching words as well as numbers! His next project involves Natural Language Processing to categorize unstructured response data collected from utility end-use customers. Natural Language Processing is the ability for computers to understand human (i.e. natural) languages. Recent advances in computing have enabled computers to approach and even exceed human-level accuracy in language comprehension at scale, and in much less time. Will is using these techniques to help our utility partners understand which particular topics their customers are concerned about and what they are happy with.

It turns out that Will and running are synonymous. Whether running randomized control trials or the hills of San Francisco Will is never without a set of running shoes and a change of clothes to get in some miles when his schedule allows. Over the past few years, Will has been tackling the road marathon circuit. Starting with Oakland and Portland in 2017, Will moved on to Boston in 2018 and 2019. He also set a new personal record of 2:39 at the 2019 Berlin Marathon. That equates to roughly a 6 minute average for over 26 miles. Seriously impressive!!! Will is currently training for the 2020 London Marathon and hopes to finish in the top 5 US runners. In the next few years he hopes to complete all the World Majors (NYC, Chicago, Berlin, Tokyo, and Boston). Will’s talents are truly unmatched, and we are so lucky to have him at WaterSmart!

Best WaterSmart Memory?

“Our annual WaterSmart Baseball day! Every year I help to organize an office outing to see the San Francisco Giants play a day game and it is always a blast. You can’t beat the “

San Francisco Food Recommendations?

“La Taqueria (best burrito in the world), Tony’s Pizza and Tekka sushi”

Favorite Office Perk?

“I recently stumbled upon someone in our building getting rid of a kegerator. I salvaged it and now have the privilege of ordering craft beer for the office!”

Want to see one of Will’s recent data projects in action?

Check out WaterSmart’s utility benchmarking solution: Performance WaterMark!
Will and WaterSmart’s mascot, Norm, riding through San Francisco on Bart!