The six IBM engineers, who came from as far away as Tokyo, ended their work at City Hall on Thursday and left behind a set of preliminary recommendations that include using additional data sources such as cellphones and even Twitter posts to improve their understanding of the city’s traffic patterns. During the next six months, the city said, it will test the application and make some of its data available to the public. Menino said the prototype would not only become a tool for city planners, but could eventually make its way onto an iPhone, too. Of course there are already iPhone apps for tracking traffic, but the engineers helped the city build a prototype software application that unifies previously hard to find and disparate data from city computers, video cameras across the city, street sensors, and databases to show a real-time picture of Boston’s traffic. The IBM team’s answer to Menino’s task came in the form of an app. “We’ve got to modernize, and understand our carbon footprint.” “We don’t do a good job of moving traffic,” said Menino. Menino asked the IBM team, which also worked with experts from Boston University, to tackle two big issues: How can the city quickly spot and undo congestion while slashing greenhouse gas emissions at the same time. The program helps cities find innovative answers to tough urban problems.īoston Mayor Thomas M. That’s what six IBM engineers worked on for three weeks this month in City Hall as part of IBM’s Smarter Cities Challenge, which awarded Boston and 32 other cities around the world each with $400,000 worth of its technical know-how. What’s the best way to fix Boston’s notoriously bad traffic? How about an app?
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