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Digital Planet: Kabul's smart traffic

Factual: Science & Nature

Afghanistan society

12/02/2013

Kabul's smart traffic

BBC World Service - Digital Planet, Kabul's smart traffic

Technology helps to keep Kabul's donkey carts, armoured vehicles and cars moving

How to keep Kabul's traffic of donkey carts, armoured vehicles and civilian cars moving; Mobile phones help the weather forecast, and the film that watches you

Kabul: Traffic Mobile
Kabul’s Innovation Lab aims to find technological solutions to everyday problems. Never was this aim more suited than to the difficulty of keeping traffic moving in a “smart” way in the Afghan capital. Researchers plan an interactive solution for an existing traffic update radio programme currently on air on Radio City. They aim to develop a mobile phone text messaging and voice recognition system that includes traffic advice by area.

Kabul’s traffic is noted for the chaotic way civilian cars, military convoys and donkey carts make their way through streets which ten years ago had relatively little traffic. Click hears from Nasir Totakhil about the plans to keep Kabul’s traffic moving.

PressureNet
Weather forecasting has improved substantially over recent decades but many parts of the world are still caught by surprise when the weather turns unexpectedly bad. A small team of developers have come up with an app called PressureNet that relies on the pressure sensors in some mobile phones to help weather forecasters make more accurate predictions. Click talks to the app developer Jacob Sheehy and professor Clifford Mass from the University of Washington, USA, who believes that new development offers revolutionary possibilities.
   
Alexis Kirke’s Many Worlds
Alexis Kirke is a polymath. Among other things he is a composer who has now turned his talents to making film, in a new project called Many Worlds. Uniquely, the film watches you as you watch it – by monitoring the viewer’s reaction to the movie with a range of sensors. Many Worlds has been developed by Kirke at the Interdisciplinary Centre for Computer Music Research at Plymouth University, UK. Ahead of its world premiere, Kirke joins Click to demonstrate the technology and the film whose sequences, at critical points, can change according to your emotions

Photo credit: AFP/Getty Images

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