Cycle AI: Utilizing artificial intelligence to ensure safer cycling in cities

Cycle AI wins first place at the first ever Euro­pean Cyclists’ Fed­er­a­tion Hackathon, orga­nized in asso­ci­a­tion with the Euro­pean Insti­tute for Inno­va­tion and Technology’s (EIT) Urban Mobil­i­ty depart­ment. Their pro­posed solu­tion will encour­age more cycling in our cities by using arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence (AI) tech­nol­o­gy to assess road safe­ty lev­els for cyclists.

What is it?
Ensur­ing cyclists’ safe­ty is one of the key obsta­cles for encour­ag­ing more cycling in our cities. At the inau­gur­al ECF Hackathon on Novem­ber 13th, 2020, Cycle AI pre­sent­ed what could be a major break­through for solv­ing this prob­lem. Their imple­men­ta­tion of state-of-the-art tech­nol­o­gy to ensure safer cycling impressed the jury pan­el, who unan­i­mous­ly award­ed their solu­tion first place in recog­ni­tion of its ben­e­fits for both infra­struc­ture devel­op­ers and infra­struc­ture users.

The Cycle AI team is made up of Luís Rita, Por­tu­gal; Joan Calvera, Spain; and Miguel Peliteiro, Por­tu­gal. Using crowd­sourced data from their web­site, their pro­posed AI mod­el will esti­mate a safe­ty score for roads by ana­lyz­ing images to detect poten­tial haz­ards for cyclists. The mod­el will then use this data to auto­mat­i­cal­ly process images based on Google Street View, widen­ing the scope of analy­sis to a nation­al scale. (The call for data is still open and active­ly look­ing for con­tri­bu­tions. If you would like to con­tribute any known dan­ger­ous hotspots for cycling, you can sub­mit your infor­ma­tion here).

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