What makes a street dangerous? Do you need a “cutting-edge” algorithm to answer that question? The City of Bellevue has said yes as it embarks on a huge crowd-sourcing effort to teach Microsoft’s traffic data analytics algorithm how to identify humans walking and biking so that traffic-camera-recorded near misses can be cataloged.
The hope is that once identified, these unsafe street conditions can be corrected, leading to fewer collisions, particularly of the deadly variety. Without a computer telling humans want to think, Bellevue planners would have no idea where to start. Luckily machines can think for them, if we program them right. That’s where the unpaid labor benefiting one of the region’s largest corporations comes in.
