It’s okay to admit that you find artificial intelligence a bit of a mystery. Everyone talks about it – but working out the ways in which the ITS sector can best utilise AI is not a question to which anyone has a definitive answer.
ITS America’s report The Impact of AI on Transportation and Mobility, published in December last year, will be a roadmap for transportation and technology stakeholders considering deploying AI. And it dovetails with this week’s ITS America Conference & Expo theme of Accelerating Digital Transformation.
“People are trying to figure out how AI impacts them,” says Tim Drake, senior vice president, public policy and government affairs at ITS America. “How is an agency using AI within their own work to streamline their processes?” he asks. “How do they use AI to improve the services that they’re providing? How is the use of AI by other stakeholders going to impact their work? There’s some reasonable hesitation around AI, especially when it’s not well understood. It’s incumbent upon us to help explain that AI is being used right now, across our transportation system.”
Understanding AI benefits
Part of ITS America’s role in the industry is helping people understand existing advantages from AI, says Drake - benefits such as traffic flow optimisation, road condition monitoring, incident detection, emergency response, vehicle automation, pedestrian safety and route planning, to name a few.
“The key is helping people understand that it is it is already benefiting their everyday life, their travel, their mobility - while also recognising that people have real concerns related to privacy and cybersecurity and equity and trust,” he adds.
ITS America is putting together a document called AI Decoded which will be published this year. “There’s a lot of opportunity - even within the intelligent transportation segment of the industry - for better understanding,” Drake tells Daily News.
Going digital
Digital infrastructure is another domain in which ITS America has a leadership role. For a working definition of ‘digital infrastructure’, Drake says: “It is all of the technologies and the communication mechanisms and the data issues around transportation infrastructure.”
This means that a lot of information and knowledge is held in many different places. “There are a number of organisations and individuals doing good work on this but it’s often siloed or uniquely focused in one area,” he explains. “And I think that there’s an opportunity to establish a national vision and framework that allows all of the good work being done to point towards the same end goal.”
A closely-related area is connectivity: at last year’s ITS America Conference & Expo in Grapevine, TX, the Federal Communications Commission announced its decision to grant a joint waver request to deploy cellular Vehicle to Everything technology in the upper 20 MHz part of the 5.9 GHz band. Drake is optimistic about progress, with USDoT mulling over deployment and FCC ironing out final regulatory steps. “It’s a little bit of waiting,” he says. “There’s some pent-up demand because of the uncertainty that we’ve faced over the last few years. It’s important that we don’t lose momentum. There is excitement to deploy.”