Researchers at the University are on the road to meeting their goal of creating technology to improve life, from conserving energy to helping people get out of a jam — traffic jams, that is.
University Research Professor Matt Ginsberg and colleague David Etherington created a Web site, Traffic Dodger, that allows drivers to avoid traffic jams in five Southern California counties — Los Angeles, Orange, Ventura, Riverside and San Bernardino.Traffic Dodger is an Internet-based personalized routing service that tells drivers the best way to get to their destination and how long the drive is likely to take.
Ginsberg and Etherington, who is director of the University’s Computational Intelligence Research Laboratory, pioneered the product as part of their research on technology optimization at the University.
“For years, the University has wanted to market technology and get research that is done here out in the world,” Etherington said. “Traffic Dodger is just one example of technology that can improve life.”
Ginsberg said he came up with the idea for Traffic Dodger in 2000, while sitting on an airplane.
“It was during the time of the dot-com foolishness, and I was talking with the person next to me about it. He was also interested in the computer madness, and that is when I thought of it.”
Ginsberg’s idea sparked out of another project on which he had been working.
He said researchers from the University had just finished a project for routing non-combat Air Force flights to reduce about 20 to 30 million gallons of jet fuel in the upper atmosphere. For the project, researchers looked at weather maps of the world and determined the best routes for planes.
Ginsberg figured the Air Force application could also be used to help reduce time spent in a car. When Ginsberg brought his ideas to his peers, they were excited about it.
On-Time Systems, a company started and managed by Ginsberg, Etherington, Research Professor Brian Drabble, and CIRL worked together for the next couple of years on the Web site.
The group decided to make the product for California because the state’s police and highway
departments use sensors to tell how fast cars are going. Etherington said the Traffic Dodger can be utilized in any area that has an adequate amount of these sensors.
Ginsberg said the Web site, www.trafficdodger.com, is a free service for now, but he hopes to sell it to Yahoo or MapQuest.
“We do not want to have to monitor how many people are looking at the site daily — we want someone else to deal with that,” he said.
Etherington said they created On-Time Systems as a company to market technology created at the University.
“The University fosters the creation of new knowledge but has no mechanism to sell it to the public,” he said. “So this is a company that can find a market for the technology.”
Etherington and Ginsberg said they are looking at optimizing the building of ships and finding optimal routes for commercial aircraft as future projects.