The Current Navigation System is Broken

                                                     

Recently, I have been reading a lot of articles about quick App development and how we can design apps and put it in the App Store or on Google Play very fast. Well today, I am going to write about an App which is years in the making. 

We all know that Navigation problems and Navigation Apps are hard. The reason being the sheer volume of data that is required to come up with a good Navigation App. We all know that Google took years to develop its Google Maps App and when Apple tried to do something similar in months they failed miserably. Even though there are so many Navigation Apps which try to solve this problem, I feel the Navigation system in place is still broken.

Now let’s dwell into the real problem with the current navigation Apps. Let’s say you want to go from A to B. The current navigation apps would take a path snapshot “at that time instant” from A to B giving you the best paths based on distance and in some Apps traffic as well. So you get a path say from A -> X -> Y ->B. This is what Google Maps or any other navigation App will give you. Now, the path from X -> Y or from Y -> B is not based on what time you reach X or Y but on the time you leave A. This is why the current Navigation system is still broken.

At Integrated Media Systems Center (IMSC) at USC, Prof.Cyrus Shahabi and Associate Director Dr. Ugur Demiryurek and the entire team at IMSC are really aimed to solve this Navigation and traffic problem. Their solution is ClearPath. ClearPath is based on years of traffic data and research. The data for Clearpath not only comes from the road networks but also from live real traffic data which are pulled from the LA Metro. So there is previous data about traffic and there is current data as well. Now when you say you want to go from A to B in ClearPath, first it takes into account the time taken to reach A -> X and X -> Y and runs spatio-temporal algorithms (based on years of research) to do pattern recognition and analysis at each X and Y to give a more accurate path which saves time. Traffic changes as you drive. It works on an algorithm that accounts for all these changes before you even start your commute. Results show that ClearPath beats all the current Navigation Apps hands down on time and accuracy of paths. Hence, ClearPath tagline reads, "The right path, all the time!".   It is featured on Android Apps, Viterbi Blog and Stevens Blog and Voanews.

ClearPath is an App which has the potential to change the future. It is a very excellent example of something which is going to be commercially successful coming out from research.