Photo by Abdul Basit © The Peninsula
A group of scientists at the Qatar Computing Research Institute (QCRI) have developed a mapping service that will help find the best routes for motorists in Qatar.
The team led by Rade Stanojevic, a senior scientist at QCRI of Hamad Bin Khalifa University, a member of Qatar Foundation, use machine learning with the data from Karwa taxi service to figure out the best way to adjust the travel time estimates depending on the time.
Stanojevic said that in Doha city, pretty much every neighbourhood sees a new underpass, new overpass, new large highway being added every couple of months.
As Qatar copes with this rapid growth and especially as it prepares to host the FIFA World Cup in 2022 the bad routing advice and accumulating travel delays from outdated digital maps is increasingly costly. That’s why Stanojevic and colleagues at QCRI decided to try applying machine learning to the problem.
“So with that kind of speed at which the city grows, the traditional mapping services cannot really keep up with the pace", said Stanojevic.
“And that caused a huge surprise for most of us who came from Europe or North America. We were amazed when we arrived in the city and realised that all the services that we take for granted like Google Maps or Bing Maps or Apple Maps, whatever your favourite digital map is, they simply don’t work. They don’t work in the city of Doha,” Stanojevic said speaking at a podcast produced by MIT Technology Review in partnership with the Qatar Foundation.
“At QCRI, we realised that a lot of these questions can be answered with network science and machine learning. And several of us started looking at the problem of automatic map inference. We started with this sometime in 2017, and we realised that this problem is both incredibly important for a lot of developing cities, but also highly challenging. And we made a lot of progress in that part, in understanding the underlying network. And then later on, we realized how we can add on top of that, these dynamic properties of the map, which are related to the traffic,” said Stanojevic.
Stanojevic and his team used that data to build a new mapping service called ‘QARTA’ that offers routing advice to drivers at Karwa and other operators such as delivery fleets. ‘QARTA’ could help cities in the Middle East and other developing regions, Stanojevic says.
“That somewhat goes along the mission of Qatar Foundation of helping the developing world. We see our target market for the system that we are building in the developing world,” said Stanojevic.
“I don’t think we can compete with the Googles of the world in the developed world for the reasons that I just described. We don’t have the resources and the expectations of the users in the West are sort of different from the expectations in the developing world.
This is one of the reasons why, what us and our leadership is excited to push for Qatar,” he added.
