SAE MobilityForward Challenge™- AI Mini Challenge
Transportation choices or lack thereof may indicate travelers' socioeconomic status and access to information, products, and services. Mobility patterns from a group of people may signify their participation and interaction in a social context, such as equity, inclusion, and accessibility. Through the SAE MobilityForward Challenge: AI Mini-Challenge, participating teams will apply data science techniques to uncover how mobility could reflect, impact, or help resolve social issues that they care about.
Teams will receive various mobility datasets, such as traffic, safety, infrastructure operation, transit, road weather, ridesharing, and delivery data of a pre-determined region. Teams will apply innovative data science techniques, including statistical analyses, data mining, and machine learning, to identify an actionable solution to a societal problem from those data sets. Teams are also required to identify, build, or use other data sets to establish the connections between mobility and social issues.
For example, as governments are rolling out COVID-19 vaccination plans, the vaccination rates vary drastically among communities. Lower vaccination rates may correlate to the restricted transportation options. A team may determine through data analysis that a community’s lack of safe and reliable transportation appears to be a barrier to vaccinations. Perhaps the team believes the data supports adding several community pop-up vaccination sites as well as a temporary bus route that services neighborhoods where the gap is most significant.
- In the Solution Stakeholder Report, they would present their selected problem to key stakeholders in the public and private sector. They would detail what solution they believe could close the gap and identify how the data supports their solution’s ability to increase access to vaccinations.
- In their Solution Technical Presentation, they would detail how they used the data to validate their conclusions about the problem and how it helped drive their solution.
- In the Solution Showcase Booth, they may display a dynamic heatmap of neighborhood vaccination rates overlayed the new sites and bus route and a data visualization of the changes to the heatmap once the new sites and bus route are implemented. As booth visitors casually joined, they may have some short, prepared statements that explain the problem and how their solution solves it. They would be prepared for questions from the booth visitors on why this bus route was chosen, what other stakeholders might need to be engaged, and if they considered using additional datasets to come to their conclusion.
- While the use of advanced data techniques will be the primary evaluation criteria, teams are encouraged to explore the relationships between mobility and social topics/trends that previously have been less studied.
