What does Manchester have in common with Jakarta, Seattle and Rio de Janeiro?

They are all fighting pollution and congestion with AI!

Manchester is being added to the list of cities in which Google's “Project Green Light” is being piloted. The Green Light project uses machine learning on Maps data to learn about congestion and wait times at certain junctions with traffic lights. The AI models can use that information to adjust the timing of traffic lights, with the aim of reducing pollution and congestion.

So far the pilot has been limited to four intersections in Israel, but has promisingly seen a  “10 to 20 percent reduction in fuel and intersection delay time”. It's great to see that the project is being expanded to a number of cities, including our very own Manchester as well as Jakarta, Abu Dhabi, Seattle, Bangalore, Hamburg, Rio de Janeiro, Hyderabad, Haifa, Budapest, Kolkata and Bali. 

Transportation is a huge area for AI, with our recent AI report showing that transport is the 4th most common technology area for AI-related patent filings at the EPO (behind life sciences, telecoms and physical sciences). What's more, AI transportation patents have the highest allowance rate of any AI-related technology at 62%.