by Hari Balakrishnan (MIT, USA)

 

 

Road transportation is a "grand challenge" societal problem.  With close to a billion vehicles on the road today, and a doubling projected over the next 15-20 years, we face pressing challenges to the efficiency and the safety of this infrastructure.  Over the past few years, the CarTel project has combined mobile computing and sensing, wireless networking, and data-intensive algorithms running on servers in the cloud to address these challenges. I will outline systems that can reduce travel times and fuel consumption with traffic-aware routing, improve safety by detecting road hazards, and change driving behavior using privacy-preserving tolling and insurance, among other things. The talk will focus on delay modeling using phone data and a new practical routing strategy, which may by itself be of independent interest.