First of its kind: Biological Systems Engineering ACWA Lab

Yeah. I'm Fs. Botar S. I'm an associated professor with the Department of Biological Systems Engineering at Virgin Tech. I'm also associated with the Commonwealth Cyber Initiative, CCI in North Virginia. This lab, we call it the Aqua Lab and stands for AI, and Cyber Biosecurity for Water and Agriculture. The main novelty of the aqua lab is that it's the first cyber physical system of its kind. The aqua Lab is aimed at creating a test bed for water supply systems, water distribution systems, and water treatment plants in the United States to test potential incidents like cyberattacks and protect against them. Additionally, the lab is able to provide datasets that are not easily created anywhere else. By combining cyber components, computational components with water quality and quantity aspects, the equal lab will enable us to attract more funding to our research and advance more scenarios and use cases for cyber and AI. Additionally, the Aqua Lab provides test bed for stakeholders such as water treatment plants and new utilities all over the country to come to Virginia Tech and evaluate the security levels at their utilities and how they can improve mitigation protection of their utilities. Lastly, this lab will also be used for educational and academic purposes. Where we have our progenic students can access data that's being generated at this lab. The data generated here is space kind. The students can have the opportunity to use this data for their research, for their classes, and for all types of other exploratory studies.