A new Urban Computing Foundation is looking to accelerate open source software that improves mobility, safety, road infrastructure, traffic congestion and energy consumption in connected cities. The forum will address issues such as the adaption of geospatial and temporal machine learning techniques and urban environments and simulation methodologies for modeling and predicting city-wide phenomena.
The project is organized by The Linux Foundation and has backing from Uber, Facebook, Google, HERE Technologies, IBM, Interline Technologies, Senseable City Labs, StreetCred Labs and University of California San Diego (UCSD).
“During moments of both technology disruption and opportunity, open development is critical for enabling interoperability and speeding adoption,” said Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation. “The Urban Computing Foundation is poised to provide the compatibility tools and resources for developers to create software that can map out and operate technology services in any given urban area, ensuring safety and equitable access to transportation.”
“As a founding participant with the Urban Computing Foundation, Uber is honored to contribute Kepler.gl as the initiative’s first official project,” said Travis Gorkin, Uber Data Visualization Lead and Urban Computing Foundation TAC contributor. “Technologies like Kepler.gl have the capacity to advance urban planning by helping policymakers and local governments gain critical insights and better understand data about their cities.”
“Civic organizations and citizens alike need ready access to data about their cities to make better decisions about transportation, construction and energy consumption. The Urban Computing Foundation’s mission to make that possible is closely aligned with Google’s approach to open data. Making it easier to access, visualize and process these kinds of large data sets is indeed at the heart of Google Cloud. We are excited to join the Urban Computing Foundation as a founding contributor and work on our shared goal of improving the world we live in,” said Chris DiBona, director, Open Source and Science Outreach, Google Cloud.
