My colleague Ananda (Lecturer, EEE) and I often brainstorm about different issues and possible solutions to these issues. And issues are abundant in Bangladesh! Believe me! Couple of weeks ago, we were discussing the terrible traffic condition in Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh. We talked about a possible system to ease people's sufferings by warning them of traffic conditions in real time.
The system will -
- leverage the widespread use of mobile/cell phones in Bangladesh to warn people of traffic conditions on different roads in Dhaka
- use travelling volunteers to upload traffic data to a central server. Data will include
- current flow of traffic on a particular road
- unusual conditions on certain roads - those conditions may include accidents, demonstrations, road works and so on
- allow people to get SMS on conditions of roads and highways based on their query
As always - our discussion remained just that - a discussion! Unfortunate, no?
Anyway - today, I, along with Minhaz, Imtiaz and Atiq took our students to a projct show held by the third year students of the CSE department of the Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology (BUET). I was amazed at the works done by the students! The projects were truly inspirational! Computer based applications to solve different everyday problems faced by Bangladesh were on display. But what truly caught my attention was a project called "Intelligent Traffic Prediction" created by Mr. Ahmed-Al-Muzaddid, Mr. Saikat Chakraborty, and Mr. Mir Tazbinur Sharif. I almost dropped the little notebook I had with me!
Their project was an almost exact replica of the system (to ease public sufferings related to traffic) Ananda and I talked about! They implemented most of the parts we had in mind with some minor differences. And they did it way better than what we had in mind!
The project boasted an Android application that sits in the background and sends gps data through the mobile network to a central server. The server then calculates the speed of the volunteer whose phone the data came from. Once data from multiple volunteers are collected from a certain area, they are put together to create a model of the movement of traffic in that area. The system also has the ability to analyze the data collected overtime to predict traffic conditions.
The only thing they didn't have was the ability for a volunteer to send unusual traffic conditions I mentioned in
the beginning! I offered this as a suggestion to them. They gracefully accepted my suggestion as a future enhancement.
My sincere thanks to these young Computer Scientists. I have their contact information and hope to work with them to complete this system and make it available for public use. I also thank Minhaz for initiating the efforts that made this trip possible and for the lunch he so graciously arranged!
