Freeflow - A Completely automatic, realtime road traffic tracking using traffic cameras and tweets.

I gave this talk at the Dublin Web Summit on October 19 2012. It's about a project I did for the BT Young Scienitst and Technology Exhibition 2012. Read about it here: http://freeflowapp.com.

Transcript

1. Hi!
 
 I’m James Eggers, a student and programmer in Dublin.
 @james_eggers james@jameseggers.com
2. WHY I’M HERE •  In January 2012, I entered my project, “FreeFlow: Detecting road traffic in real time with Twitter and Traffic Cameras” into the BT Young Scientist. •  It won it’s category, and the EMC ‘data-hero’ award. •  In the BT Business of Science, it won ‘Best Digital Project’, which included the opportunity to speak to you today!
3. WHAT DID IT DO EXACTLY? •  Automatically gathered real-time road traffic data •  With Traffic Cameras and via Twitter •  Dispensed structured road traffic info via web app •  Also displayed data about ice levels on roads, average road temperature and air temperture from the national roads authority.
4. TRAFFIC CAMERA ALGORITHM
5. TRAFFIC CAMERAS •  Every ~10 minutes, traffic cameras take a picture •  Pictures are analysed with an algorithm I created
6. O’CONNELL BRIDGE 22/12/11
7. JUST NEED THE ROADS
9. TWITTER •  Twitter was a great source of information •  Tweets were analyzed in real-time •  Looking for words like “accident” or “delays” •  Location was also found by searching for words like “on” or “at”. •  Then used Bing Maps to complete the address, and convert to latitude/longitude pair to map. •  Tweets that mentioned an incident, were kept for 4 hours before being cleared from the system.
12. THANKS! QUESTIONS? @james_eggers james@jameseggers.com