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My name is Gene Eidson, I am a professor of Biological Sciences and I am the principal
investigator for the Intelligent River. The project began in 2007 when we had a faculty
forum. We invited faculty from all colleges and departments to come together and listen
to a panel tell us what water issues South Carolina was facing.
In order to tackle the project we chose to tackle, which was; how do you enhance traditional
research methods with cyberinfrastructure; we realized that we needed a lot of people.
Our goal is to optimize every drop of water, and how do you grow the economy, how do you
protect the environment; we believe you can do it all, but you need data in order to do
that. You need a system. We believe the Intelligent River will bring
that system to the market. Our approach is different because we are looking
at a long-term monitoring program and we are developing new technologies. The cost to do
this type of work is prohibitive based on current technologies on the market. What we
decided to do was to scrap the existing technologies and start from scratch and create our own.
We are creating a technology that will transform the way that we monitor both the natural and
the built environment. This is the green economy and this is a knowledge-based economy, which
will not only bring a new cost-effective way to monitor resources within our state, it
will bring jobs. I believe the Intelligent River is in its
infancy. We’re just beginning.