Interactive Coventry Ltd, in collaboration with Coventry University and Malaysian industrial partners (Metrobinaya Sdn Bhd and Pentalight Technology Sdn Bhd), has received a prestigious funding award by Innovate (UK) and PlaTCOM Ventures (Malaysia), to lead the development of an advanced urban flooding monitoring and forecasting platform. Interactive Coventry was awarded funding in the competition: “Newton Fund: UK-Malaysia Urban Innovation Challenge 2017”, which is a bilateral framework providing facilitation and financial support for Malaysian and UK organisations through business-led collaborations.

The project titled “Flood Ultra-Cognitive Dendrite (FLUD)” is estimated to cost over £750,000, and builds upon state of the art research, and technologies in computational intelligence and machine learning, to develop an urban flooding monitoring and forecasting platform. FLUD aims to minimise the impact of flash floods through developing an economically sustainable technical approach to flood-alert systems in a way that considers citizen accessibility of its service regardless of age, race, literacy and social status.

The proposed approach will be tested in the context of two high risk areas in Malaysia, and the final product will be a benchmark framework, which can be utilised in smart city projects in Malaysia, the UK, and other countries facing extreme urban flooding phenomena.