When it comes to in-car GPS travel assistance, the market offers a multitude of handy solutions to help drivers reach their destinations smoothly and efficiently. However, Microsoft is looking to push the overall service up a level with its new traffic-defining Clearflow technology.
Microsoft Clearview set to help drivers avoid traffic chaos. Credit: Ximenatapia/Flickr.
Set to arrive as a contributing element of Microsoft’s Live.com online service, Clearflow has been designed by the Redmond-based software giant to specifically provide drivers with the necessary route knowledge to dodge potential traffic delays.
Developed over the last five years by a team of A.I. researchers working out of a Microsoft Research laboratory, the New York Times describes Clearview as a system evolved from machine-learning techniques that will assist drivers by processing the “complex traffic interactions that occur as traffic backs up on freeways and spills over onto city streets.”
Microsoft outlines that the Clearflow system will process such information and duly provide drivers with alternative routes to their destinations based on freeway and city street traffic conditions.
Clearflow also arrives as somewhat of a patch for Microsoft following user problems experienced since the company first introduced its driver assistance system in the latter half of 2007.
Specifically, the incorporation of Clearview and its traffic appreciation should help alleviate errors in the original system that would occasionally see it recommending alternative routes to drivers only for them to be equally or more congested than the busy highways.
It is expected that the arrival of Clearview may initially confound impatient drivers to a degree, with its technology likely to recommend a driver remain on a congested highway rather than seek an alternative route if possible alternatives are deemed to be no less costly in terms of accrued journey time.
The inspiration for Clearview’s creation was born out of a traffic nightmare experienced by Microsoft A.I. researcher Eric Horvitz back in 2003.
According to Mr. Horvitz, his attempts to sidestep a traffic jam on his journey by seeking an alternative route through his in-car navigation only led to further congestion because the system he was relying on had no reliable information in terms of potential traffic away from the highway.
In order to plug such a gap, Microsoft researchers subsequently began the process of building software algorithms that portrayed traffic effects whilst also gathering journey information taken from the GPS units of volunteer Microsoft employees.
Clearview and its traffic prediction system was subsequently born out of four years of data collection throughout the city of Seattle, which involved some 16,500 GPS-monitored trips across more than 125,000 miles.
The system has since been adapted to include 79 cities across North America while its journey and traffic information is processed in conjunction with live data and influential variables taken from an expansive network of highway sensors split into around 60 million different sections of road.
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