Leveraging Big Data for a Better Tomorrow

technical has undergone

a drastic transformation over time

from a regional industrial hub to one of

the

most polluted city in the country to a

city

that now is known to be a living lab for

smart city research

today i want to tell you the story of

how chattanooga

as a mid-sized city in southeast

tennessee

along the tennessee river in the

foothills of appalachian

mountains became a living lab for smart

city

the site was established in 1800s

and the name was changed to chattanooga

in 1834

which means iraq rising to a point it’s

speculated

that refers to the luca mountain around

the city of chattanooga

the city economy was growing

and it became the growth what became

stimulated

when the railroad industry started in

1830s and 1840s

between 18 mid 1800s and mid 1900

chattanooga was a regional hub for

manufacturing

and industry it was producing and

manufacturing

stills saddlery parts automobile parts

and appliances

the city was growing so was the economy

and

population the entrepreneurship

was also there examples of that we can

talk about dixie

and coca-cola bottling company

the manufacturing grew but also it left

scar on the city it was not expected

the rise in manufacturing increased the

pollution

that led to population going down

local economy was not strong enough

and was not strong anymore in fact

the city in 1969 was named the dirtiest

city in the country the city

hit its bottom when it was at its lowest

a group of dedicated people decided

to stay to innovate

to invest they were looking at it

from a high level to see which decision

they can make that it can revolting

the city and

to do that they were looking for

applications that would have

impact on the local

community chattanooga is surrounded by

beautiful natural resources so the

project they chose as the first project

was tennessee river park

this beautiful trail goes along the

tennessee river

those of you that have walked or hiked

or ran on that trail you know that this

is 11 mile

stretch of the trail in downtown area

along the river and you can go on that

without having to

step on any paved road

another example of that was the aquarium

that was built

in downtown area

this group had bold visions

they took bold steps to

completely change the urban they brought

the sense of urban

to downtown area they did a lot of

effort to clean the air to clean the

water

to make urban livable and enjoyable

while innovation was definitely there

technology and entrepreneurship was

still

missing in branding of chattanooga

that was changed when epb installed

fiber optic throughout the city as a

backbone for the telecommunication

that is when epb brought chattanooga to

the age of high speed

to the information age they installed

9 000 miles of fiber that would provide

access to every house and every

businesses

in the 600 square mile territory of epb

that provide internet up to 10 gigabit

per second

at tens of times faster than

national average the gig provided

opportunities for chattanooga to be able

to develop

applications that it would change

completely the way that to do conduct

business

to learn to live and play

and that also provided opportunities

for entrepreneurship to reappear in

chattanooga

geek tank is example of that gig tank is

a

boutique accelerator for startups

to develop business applications that

can thrive

on low latency and fast internet

they bring a cohort of high-tech

companies

here to chattanooga in fact chattanooga

is the only city in the country

that a startup company can test their

ideas

in a community-wide fiber optic

it was around this time that was decided

future is not about technology

future is about people whenever we talk

about smart city

the word smart in smart city resonates

as

sensor internet of things connectivity

data artificial intelligence

that is true it’s not the end of it

the human factor should be behind

every project that it’s done in smart

city

in fact technology should facilitate

application that can

improve the quality of life

but enable in order to be to do that

we need to make sure that community talk

to each other

they talk to people we break the silos

between departments and municipalities

we know what are the challenges and

issues

we need to think about it can research

solve those issues

more importantly can it be implemented

will those solutions be adopted by

citizens

and that is when chattanooga smart

community collaborative

was born in fact that’s the latest

community effort that’s happening in

chattanooga

it consists of seven entities city of

chattanooga

hamilton county epb the enterprise

center

colab which is the startup

incubator the university of tennessee at

chattanooga

erlanger health systems the goal for

the collaborative is to through

collaboration

and through new tools and technologies

we will be able to look at the city

through new lands

there are a lot of efforts going on

through this collaborative

but i’m going to be talking about ones

that are related to

mobility safety and quality of life

about two years ago at utc the center

for urban informatics and progress

cuip was established we are

living in the urbanization century it’s

expected by 2050

which is only 30 years from now

two-thirds of population living in urban

environment

it has its own challenges and its own

opportunities

the goal at cuip is to address these

challenges

we want to make urban livable accessible

healthy for all at cuip

we do applied researches research that

would contribute to the smart city

research body as well as improve the

community of life

it would contribute to the local

community

and we are working on different areas

health energy mobility social science

and we’re going to talk about couple of

them today

which city doesn’t want to reduce their

number of crashes

in fact numbers are showing that the

number of accidents

in tennessee and in hamilton county as

well as the number of fatalities

have been growing over the past few

years

9-1-1 data is the open source data that

everyone can have

access to it we wanted to see that what

does these numbers tell us

what can we do with these numbers and

how can we use them to remedy these

issues

we drew them with respect to time we

aggregate data

and we looked at them based on the time

of the day

for every day of the week the trend

clearly shows the number of accident

goes up during the rush hour

and the number of accidents during the

weekday is more than the weekends

in fact it even shows us the rush hour

on fridays it starts at 4 pm

the other thing we wanted to look at was

how about spatially so we look at the

data according to space

and as you can see here this shows the

number of

aggregated accidents that happen at each

space

changing over the time clearly there is

a trend there

at the same time we talked about this

that perhaps everybody

knows accidents are happening on the

where accidents are happening on

interstates

and there are more accidents there and

also everybody probably knows

where are these accidents happening

where are the exact locations on the

interstates

so we wanted to look at more of a local

intersections

that they were having a high number of

accidents there were hot spots for

accidents and crashes

what you can see here is a residential

street

that has a speed limit of 35.

in the larger region there has been 88

accidents in the past two years and in

that exact

spot there has been 22 accidents

this is a objective and unbiased data

while we are data scientists we’re not

necessarily traffic engineers or urban

planners

so true collaborative we reached out to

the sparsity director of city of

chattanooga

through the discussions with him we

realized that

the poll was the reason for the car

accidents

the pool was too close to the road by

moving it ever so

slightly there has been no accidents

since june 2019.

this is a project that has a real impact

on community

we are saving lives we are saving

resources

saving property and also we’re saving

human cost here

but these are the things that we can

learn based on

historical data the question

is can we do prediction can we predict

where are going to be the accidents on a

thursday rainy afternoon

and that’s what we decided to do we

looked at the data

the 911 data is openly available

we also looked at road geometries how is

the curvature of the road

how many lanes there are there are there

sidewalks there

are there crosswalks there what kind of

pavement it’s there

and we also look at the weather at the

time of accident

was it raining was it foggy

or was it a clear sunny day we put all

these data together and we built a

predictive model

what you see here is a prediction that

we have done

on the accidents for january 20th 2020.

we use the data up to january 19

to predict where are going to be the

accidents

on january 20th and what you see the

hexagons

show the areas that have the chance of

accidents

the bluer the color the higher rate

accident the higher chance of accident

happening there

on january 21st we got the data from

9-1-1 county and we looked and we

overlaid them

and you can see that we can predict with

the high accuracy of where the accidents

potentially can happen one of the

immediate applications for this is we

can

allocate first responders according to

this prediction

we all know that the faster the response

the lower the lower the fatality rates

and also property damage

so we talked about vehicles what about

pedestrians

what about cyclists even if you drive to

your office you still have to park and

perhaps cross the street to get to your

office

or you go for a cup of coffee or go for

lunch you still have to walk or bike

we wanted to also see how it or

how safe are our roads where are the hot

spots of

accidents for pedestrian and cyclists

because we have seen the

fatality rates that were related

to car crashes for pedestrian are also

rising

to be able to do that we need to answer

some questions

how and when a pedestrian would use

a given sidewalk

how how are they going to be using

different crosswalks

how long do they have to wait to be able

to cross that intersection

because if you have to wait a long time

to cross perhaps you’re going to jaywalk

the same thing for vehicles how long do

they have to wait to before they can

cross the intersection

because if it’s going to be too long

then they’re going to be more aggressive

the answering to these questions would

give us actionable data

that we can look into to evaluate the

safety for pedestrians and cyclists

but unlike the 911 data this data

doesn’t exist so true collaborative

we actually built a test bed in downtown

chattanooga

those of you that are from chattanooga

recognize this history this is martin

luther king boulevard in downtown

we have built a test bed which is a mile

and a quarter route stretch of the

boulevard here and we chose this

because it has a bike lane it has bike

share station

ev charging station it has a transit

it’s next to campus there’s a lot of

walking and biking activities happening

there

also has residential and businesses so

it kind of represents a small version of

the urban

we equipped different intersections with

different sensors

such as cameras we have high resolution

cameras that we can detect the objects

what we care about is this is a car a

person

a bus we do not care about the

personally identifiable data there

we also have lidar there that would be

able to give us the distance in a high

resolution

we have audio sensor perhaps we can use

it to hear

siren and be able to empty the street so

emergency vehicle can pass through

faster

there are also 5g and fiber

for being able to transmit data with low

latency

and finally we have also edge computing

for applications that

require processing fast and right on the

spot

what you see here is one of the cameras

on the test bed we have been collecting

the data we have been using computer

vision

to detect the objects and after

collecting them over

a period of time what you see at the

bottom here is a hit map

of the objects that have been seen on

the test bed over a period of time

pink shows where the pedestrian are

it makes a perfect sense that on the

sidewalk is we see a lot of pink

also next to the parking spots we see

pink because people

can park their car and get out of their

car but we also see

there are some jaywalking activity there

are some it’s been seeing that

there’s some crossing happening at

non-designated areas

we also see that there are places that

the cars and buses are getting

too close to the bike lane using this we

will be able to evaluate the safety of

our streets

similar to the previous case these are

history data

what about prediction can we do any

prediction here

what you see in this video shows us

where is every object going to be in the

next

couple of seconds so if i know the

person that is crossing where it’s going

to be in the next couple of seconds

and where the vehicle going to be in the

next couple of seconds then we can

measure the time to collision if that is

too small

that should be a warning for the driver

as well as the pedestrian or the cyclist

using this

we can collect where are the places in

the city

that we are seeing a lot of near misses

which basically means the accident

didn’t happen but it was about to happen

and knowing those areas can improve the

safety of

our streets

so in summary this happened in

chattanooga

because a dedicated group of people

decided

to stay invest and innovate

same choices are happening today

we can see that the innovation and

investment that happened in the

collaborative

in cuip the testbed that we just talked

about

even in the past few years we have seen

how smart city had positive

outcome in our community

the collaborative is involved in a lot

of other projects in addition to what i

talked about related to mobility

they’re doing projects in energy in

health equity

social science and more

these efforts that are ongoing will take

chattanooga to the next level

perhaps some of these can also be

used in other communities they can be

adopted by other communities as well

thank you