CACTUS

Check past, present, and future crowd congestion of campus locations safely from home!

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Introduction

The pandemic has changed all our lives in unprecedented ways. We have had to give up the simple pleasures of lunch with friends, or going to a movie theater.

If we wish to regain a sense of normalcy and not just become increasingly isolated, we need to be well-informed and vigilant about our safety. This need inspired us to create the Campus Activity Congestion Tracking Using access pointS (CACTUS) tool.

CACTUS

CACTUS is meant to inform students and faculty on a university campus about the number of people in any given location. Users can call into a Watson helpline and ask about the current occupancy in any building, or they can use our real-time dashboard to check at a glance which locations on campus are busy. This allows them to make responsible choices about where to safely eat, study or hang out.

Implementation

CACTUS collects data from WiFi access points about the number of people connected to it. This data is sent to an IBM Cloud database where we use machine learning tools to forecast the trend of traffic flow for every access point. Users can retrieve this information by calling into a Watson helpline and asking about the current status of any location. The chatbot retrieves this information and informs the user. Alternatively, users can go to a real-time dashboard hosted on IBM's server services which shows a heat map of the university campus, showing the distribution of people across the campus at a glance.

Challenges

Working on this project gave us all a chance to familiarize ourselves with some technologies that we had not worked with before, including IBM’s cloud database, IBM's server hosting, and Watson. We had to make sure our robust time series prediction machine learning algorithm for forecasting traffic flow trends was optimized so that it could be seamlessly retrieved when users called our helpline with an inquiry.

Future Work

We believe CACTUS can be implemented across an entire city. By tracking and providing real-time traffic flows we can help people make responsible and safe decisions about their activities by avoiding areas with high traffic. Public health infrastructure is vital to controlling the pandemic and we hope that CACTUS can be one part of that broader project.

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