Making Roads Safer by Making Drivers Better

The world's roads see over 50 million injuries and 1.25 million fatalities every year; road accidents are the leading cause of death among people between the ages of 15 to 30. This talk will describe how mobile sensing (especially using smartphones), signal processing, machine learning, and behavioral science can improve road safety by making people better drivers. I'll discuss several challenges in achieving this goal, as well as learnings from successful deployments in multiple countries. Interesting problems include inferring vehicular dynamics from noisy sensor data; accurate drive detection; detecting and discouraging distracted driving; designing good incentives for safe-driving; and the design of new sensing platforms to augment smartphone sensors.