AI-powered digital Dhaka: A step towards safer roads

Gaze Technology, owned by a team of young Bangladeshi students has devised a project to manage the traffic of Dhaka and make the roads safer. Shehzad Noor Taus, the co-founder, has worked on AI surveillance and computer vision software in the US and Canada for IBM Watson and NVIDIA Metropolis. After building and deploying technologies like face recognition and vehicle identification using AI for real world applications across the world, he thought of bring-ing it to Bangladesh.Using AI powered video analytics software for CCTV cameras, and col-lecting real-time traffic data for traffic signal automation, the team is determined to leave be-hind a positive impact. "Living in Vancouver, updates from Bangladesh indicated an exponen-tial rise in the number of road accidents. That's when my friends and I decided to do something that would help reduce the problems faced on the roads," said the CSO, Syed Tanzil Ahmed. In October 2018, Gaze collaborated with Dhaka Metropolitan Police in an attempt to tackle road safety efficiently. Project 'Digital Dhaka' is currently being led by Tanzil.  They have used Au-tomatic Number Plate Recognition to detect unfit vehicles and the ones without permits and re-late it to a database to find out all the details of the vehicle owners. Their software is able to de-tect vehicles as well as pedestrians violating traffic rules. "We have been corresponding with visionary leaders in the DMP, who have shown great ability and enthusiasm, as they encourage us to keep developing our software," said Maruful Haque Chowdhury,  the director of public sector at Gaze. They are working hard to make the system fully automated so that people can easily detect who is at fault on the roads. They are also working towards the automation of traf-fic lights. "Currently the traffic signals on our roads either do not work or are timer-controlled. We plan to collect data on real time vehicle counts so that coordination of traffic signals can be done more efficiently," says Tasfia Tasbin, the product manager of the company.

Gaze Technology has been invited for an interview by Y-Combinator, the same company that incubated the growth of enterprises such as Dropbox, Airbnb and Reddit.It is an accelerator programme which funds 200 companies annually. Every year, over 22000 entrepreneurs apply and only three percent qualify for the interview. In the future, Gaze Technology aims to be as-sociated many more security firms.