Deep learning helps predict traffic crashes before they happen

Today's world is one big maze, connected by layers of concrete and asphalt that afford us the luxury of navigation by vehicle. For many of our road-related advancements -- GPS lets us fire fewer neurons thanks to map apps, cameras alert us to potentially costly scrapes and scratches, and electric autonomous cars have lower fuel costs -- our safety measures haven't quite caught up. We still rely on a steady diet of traffic signals, trust, and the steel surrounding us to safely get from point A to point B. To get ahead of the uncertainty inherent to crashes, scientists from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and the Qatar Center for Artificial Intelligence developed a deep learning model that predicts very high-resolution crash risk maps. Fed on a combination of historical crash data, road maps, satellite imagery, and GPS traces, the risk maps describe the expected number of crashes over a period of time in the future, to identify high-risk areas and predict future crashes. Typically, these types of risk maps are captured at much lower resolutions that hover around hundreds of meters, which means glossing over crucial details since the roads become blurred together.