The Qatar Computing Research Institute (QCRI) will soon develop an application for maps of cities based on real time data, a scientist told Gulf Times yesterday.
“We are on a new project called map-making through GPS (Global Positioning System) trajectories from smartphones which can be automatically used for the map of a city,” said Dr Sanjay Chawla, principal scientist, Data Analytics Group, QCRI, on the sidelines of the ongoing Machine Learning and Data Analytics Symposium.
Dr Chawla explained that map-making is a big initiative of QCRI. “It is a crowd-sourced GPS initiative with trajectories from smartphones. We are coming out with a real time map on GPS trajectory. It is a research work now and the idea is to come up with an app which people can use for deciding their route of journey based on real time or near-real time situation.”
“For example a lot of road works are going on in Doha. Road networks keep changing and people may have to take different routes or turns compared to their previous visit to a particular destination. Google Maps do not get updated very quickly. This application can help them decide on their best routes,” he said.
“We have already written the research paper and it is out on the web. We are actually building a demo for it and will showcase it in an academic conference in August. As we get more and more data and more fine grain data, there will be more opportunities for machine learning data analytics,” the official said.
The QCRI scientist also said that the research institute has several other projects which are very exciting. “We have already developed the real time Arabic to English translation, application for converting 2D television images to 3D and many more. Many are using them.”
“Our programme, ADER for emergency and disaster response has helped many during several natural calamities around the world. We collect data from areas where there are cyclones or earthquakes and the data is collected from tweets and other messages,” highlighted Dr Chawla.
The official said that QCRI is the premier computer research institute in the region. “All the research outcomes from QCRI are put out for open use. We are making an impact which is felt across the world. Predominantly, our work is on data science. We have five different groups. Either we are creating new tools for data science or working on data science for applications,” he added.
Dr Sanjay Chawla
