New AI Tool to Keep India’s Transportation Running in Monsoon Season Made by Northeastern Graduate and Professor
Residents of New Delhi in India carry belongings through flood waters caused by monsoon rains in September. (Salman Ali/PTI via AP)
CEE PhD alumni, Udit Bhatia, PhD’18, and COE Distinguished Professor Auroop Ganguly, have co-founded a startup company based on a tool called AIResQ, an AI tool that predicts the magnitude and impact of flooding in Indian cities, especially helpful during monsoon season.
This article originally appeared on Northeastern Global News. It was published by Cynthia McCormick Hibbert.
Monsoons in India bring life-giving rains and urban flooding. A Northeastern graduate’s startup helps keep trains running and highways open
Seasonal monsoon rains in India turn crops lush and fill essential water reservoirs. They can also cause roads to flood and bring train travel to a standstill, impacting the economic heartbeat of cities and towns.
Udit Bhatia, a scientist trained at Northeastern and now an effective entrepreneur, has a new startup that looks to AI to not only better predict rainfall amounts but also to prescribe best responses to urban flooding in India.
From rerouting traffic and evacuating residents to using pumps at strategic locations along railroad lines, the new program, called AIResQ, aims to release the bottlenecks that keep India’s streets clogged during the rainy season that runs June through September.
AIResQ “is not just about predicting floods but also about doing it in real time,” said Bhatia, an associate professor of civil engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology, who co-founded AIResQ with Northeastern’s College of Engineering Distinguished Professor Auroop Ganguly.
“One of the products we develop for cities is where they get to foresee in real time or near-real time (what) traffic would look like if it starts raining at a particular time in the day,” said Bhatia, who received his Ph.D from Northeastern in 2018.
AIResQ models can show that it’s going to start raining at 3 p.m., and then the program can also indicate which areas are going to be a hotspot for traffic by 6 p.m. or 7 p.m., when most people are leaving the office, Bhatia explained.
From there AIResQ helps come up with solutions depending on the depth of water, as well as the velocity, direction of flow and total volume of water in particular locations, he said.
Bhatia’s development integrates physics and AI to solve problems in urban hydrology, Ganguly said, who calls his former student an innovator.
AIResQ is already in demand.
Two cities using the program are Gurugram, which is just outside India’s capital city of New Delhi, and Changodar, an industrial part of the city of Ahmedabad in the western state of Gujarat. Those cities are working with Bhatia’s startup on seasonal flooding issues, said AIResQ board member Vivek P. Kapadia.
“What is especially important in the AIResQ approach is that it goes beyond flood prediction alone,” Kapadia said. “The objective is not merely to know where water will accumulate but to understand what that means for infrastructure and what can be done about it in time.”
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Prof. Auroop Ganguly, left, serves as advisor and co-founder to former Ph.D student Udit Bhatia’s startup, AIResQ. Photos by Matthew Modoono/Northeastern University and Courtesy Photo
Read full article at Northeastern Global News