Early Adopter News: January 2010

Dear Mobile Millennium Early Adopters,

Thanks to your participation, the Mobile Millennium pilot traffic-monitoring system has been a huge success. We hope you found the traffic information useful and enjoyed helping to develop cutting-edge technology.

UC Berkeley launched the pilot program from the Berkeley campus on November 10, 2008. It ran for exactly 12 months. During that time, more than 5,000 users downloaded the Mobile Millennium traffic software onto their phones. Our research has advanced the areas of traffic-data collection and location-based services.

The download feature of the pilot has now concluded. Early Adopters are free to keep using the software. The Mobile Millennium traffic-monitoring system currently operational at UC Berkeley integrates numerous feeds into traffic models, which broadcast highway and arterial traffic information in real-time. The feeds include data obtained from GPS-enabled mobile phones, all of San Francisco's taxis (through GPS), plus radar, loop detectors, and historical databases.

The software incorporates high levels of privacy to separate position data from information about individual phone users. These include:

  • Banking-grade encryption;
  • "Virtual trip lines" - data collection points that yield only traffic information and do not detect a user's personal information.

Mobile Century Data Release!

Mobile Century was the original proof-of-concept field test, held Feb. 8, 2008, that led to the Mobile Millennium project. Tomorrow (Friday, January 8, 2010), the Mobile Millennium project will release to the research community the cellular-phone GPS data obtained from the Mobile Century experiment.

We look forward to sharing this data with our colleagues. Mobile Century data will be released to individuals with legitimate research interests only. (Request the data here.) By providing a benchmark data set to the engineering community, we hope to extend the value of our research and help UC Berkeley fulfill its public service mission.

Thank You

We'd like to take one last opportunity to thank you for participation in the process of innovation. Globally, people waste billions of hours, dollars, and fuel stuck in traffic. Improving traffic information is consistent with UC Berkeley's mission to conduct research in the public interest, and your willingness to try research-grade technology was critical in helping us to achieve the goals of this project.

Sincerely,

The Mobile Millennium Team