MIT Professor’s IoT Sensors Make Roads Safer

Back in 2005, earlier than smartphones have been usually obtainable, MIT Professor Hari Balakrishnan was so fed up with commuting delays in Boston that he constructed a cell system to observe highway circumstances.

He and his analysis workforce at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory developed CarTel, brief for automotive telematics. Using sign processing and machine studying, their sensing system for autos was in a position to infer the presence of potholes and different impediments from modifications in visitors circulation, which it measured with GPS and an accelerometer. Their analysis received a number of awards, and the system was coated by The Boston Globe.

In 2010 Balakrishnan and two cofounders commercialized CarTel by launching Cambridge Mobile Telematics. Today the Massachusetts firm is the most important telematics service supplier on this planet. Insurance firms, automotive producers, rideshare companies, and public businesses use CMT information to evaluate driver habits, encourage safer driving, dispatch roadside help, and extra.

Balakrishnan, an IEEE Fellow, is that this 12 months’s Marconi Prize winner for his “fundamental discoveries in mobile sensing, networking, and distributed systems.” The award, given by the Marconi Society, is taken into account to be the highest honor in communications.

“On paper this award honors me, but it really is a recognition of my 30-plus Ph.D. students, postdocs, collaborators, and the team at CMT who have worked incredibly hard in creative ways to take research ideas and have them really impact the world,” he says. “It honors the field of mobile sensing and networked systems.”

Hari Balakrishnan talks to the Marconi Society about his profession highlights and his ideas on receiving the prize.Marconi Society

Using information to make driving safer

Balakrishnan got here up with the thought for CarTel whereas speaking with fellow MIT Professor Samuel Madden, a director of the college’s Data Systems and AI Lab and an professional on information administration and sensor computing.

“I told him we should start a research project that takes sensors that we both know a lot about, attach them to cars, measure what’s happening, and then try to understand the data,” Balakrishnan remembers. “This was before iPhones, Androids, and Google Maps.”

They later based CMT, with Madden serving as its chief scientist.

“CarTel was one of the first projects in mobile sensing,” Balakrishnan says. “We confirmed that it might work at scale.

“I was trying to figure out how to commercialize it using the notion of mobile sensing for social good.”

Help got here in 2009 from William V. Powers, a seasoned gross sales govt who turned Balakrishnan’s enterprise associate. He can be a CMT cofounder and the corporate’s CEO.

Balakrishnan says that though the startup had the expertise, it didn’t have a enterprise mannequin. After studying articles about how insurance coverage firms have been utilizing costly {hardware} to measure individuals’s driving to set premium costs and uncover fraudulent claims, they discovered their mannequin.

“Our mission is to make the world’s roads and drivers safer.”

“It clicked in my head that we had shown, in principle, how to do that with consumer phones and inexpensive Internet of Things [IoT] devices that could be put into a car without professional installers,” he says.

That early system developed into DriveWell, an AI-driven platform that gathers information from displays together with accelerometers, gyroscopes, and place sensors in smartphones, dashcams, and IoT gadgets such because the DriveWell Tag.

The platform combines the knowledge with contextual information to create an image of how drivers are working their autos, measuring elements resembling exhausting braking, extreme rushing, and telephone distraction, Balakrishnan says.

“Our mission is to make the world’s roads and drivers safer,” he says.

DriveWell has offered companies to greater than 30 million autos thus far. Insurance firms together with Admiral, Discovery, HUK-Coburg, MS&AD, and USAA use CMT’s packages to supply reductions to higher drivers. CMT just lately partnered with Hyundai to supply its clients real-time roadside help and restore companies. There are additionally DriveWell, FuelStar, and Openroad cell apps for motorists who need suggestions about their driving.

The first indoor location system

Balakrishnan has created different methods that use sensors for sensible functions. Between 1999 and 2004, he oversaw the event of the Cricket indoor location system. It mixed radio frequency and ultrasound applied sciences. Beacons mounted on partitions and ceilings publish data on an RF channel, which sends out a chirping sign. The beacon then sounds out a corresponding ultrasonic pulse. Receivers hooked up to cell gadgets hear for the RF indicators and the ultrasonic pulse. Cricket makes use of the totally different speeds of sound and of RF to calculate the gap between the receiver and the beacon.

The system offered area identifiers, place coordinates, and orientation. Cricket offered distance ranging and positioning precision of between 3 and 5 centimeters. It was utilized in areas the place GPS didn’t work effectively, resembling hospitals, workplace buildings, and analysis facilities.

“GPS only works outdoors,” Balakrishnan says. “Even today, you can’t get GPS signals inside. When your apps show you the location inside, it’s using other technologies.”

The analysis workforce open-sourced the {hardware} and software program, and greater than 1 million items have been constructed and deployed.

“This approach didn’t scale to every device in the world,” Balakrishnan says, “because adding ultrasonic hardware to every device is not practical. However, with modern smartphones capable of sending and receiving ultrasonic signals on their speakers and microphones, the approach developed in Cricket might become useful in the future. Indeed, some recent proposals for contact tracing for COVID-19 have used this approach.”

This 12 months’s IEEE Medal of Honor recipient Vint Cerf congratulates Marconi Prize winner Hari Balakrishnan on the Marconi Awards Gala, held on 27 October in Washington, D.C.Marconi Society

A love of analysis and academia

Balakrishnan earned a bachelor’s diploma in pc science in 1993 from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras. He picked the sphere, he says, as a result of he thought it will let him make sensible use of arithmetic.

“I knew nothing about computer science,” he says. “I had never programmed a computer before. But I knew I was interested in things that were mathematical in nature, and I enjoyed both math and physics greatly. After about a year and a half, I felt like I understood what the field was about. By the time I finished my undergraduate degree, I absolutely loved it.”

While pursuing a Ph.D. in pc science on the University of California, Berkeley, he turned captivated with conducting analysis, he says. He loved it a lot, he says, that he needed to make a profession of it.

He’s additionally identified for his early analysis on the best way to enhance wi-fi networks—which will be discovered within the IEEE Xplore Digital Library and which received the 1998 Association for Computing Machinery’s Doctoral Dissertation Award.

In the ultimate 12 months of his Ph.D., in 1998, he determined to pursue an instructional profession. He interviewed for a school place at MIT and knew instantly it was the place he needed to work, he says. The college employed him that 12 months, and he has labored there ever since.

“I felt like this was the place where people were on the same wavelength as me,” he says. “It’s always good to go to a place where people appreciate what you do.”

Despite his entrepreneurial success, Balakrishnan continues to show.

“I just really enjoy working with students and just love research,” he says. “I enjoy teaching students and, frankly, they teach me as much as I teach them.”

The IEEE group

Balakrishnan says he intially joined IEEE as a pupil to get the discounted price for membership and convention registrations. But after he started working, he realized that it’s necessary to be a part of a “professional community that has like-minded people who care about the fields that I care about,” he says. “IEEE has benefited my career because I’ve been at conferences and events where I’ve made professional connections that will last a lifetime.”

He can be a member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

IEEE acknowledged him in 2021 with its Koji Kobayashi Computers and Communications Award for “broad contributions to computer networking and mobile and wireless systems.”