Insight Lane at MIT

I’m still cranking away at part 6 of my LLM series, but I didn’t want you all to think I’d gone dormant again! This week I got the old band together to promote our Insight Lane crash modelling project at MIT Media Lab’s AI in the Built World event.

Look at those smiling faces! We had a lot of interest, though I realize we were surrounded mostly by startups a-pitching. People asked us what our business model is and, you know, I think I answered pretty well. Insight Lane, I feel, is unique in that it is designed to be city agnostic, even dataset agnostic. It’s a flexible platform that is optimized for measuring crash risk on road networks. We’ve had people come in from all over to onboard their cities and it’s a pretty streamlined process. This, we feel, is the “base” on which a lot of much more complex things can be built.

Business model-wise - it probably means a managed service model. The open source platform will be free and open forever. But if a company or a government wanted something specific to be built on top of it with their use-case in mind, that could potentially bring in money. Or, at least, data. And data, oil, etc.

The event itself was interesting! It was a really fascinating blend of panelists:

• Jason Snyder, CIO, Commonwealth of Massachusetts
• Kent Larson - Director, City Science group at MIT
• Jit Kee Chen - EVP & CDO, Suffolk Technology
• Marc Nezet - CDO, Nemetschek
• Usman Shuja - CEO, Bluebeam
• Ramesh Raskar - Associate Director, MIT Media Lab

There was an interesting representation of construction and architecture (i.e. Nemetschek, Suffolk Tech, Bluebeam) and (I thought) a lack of representation of government entities. When I think “built world” I think of cities, which typically have a lot of government involvement in the operations and advancement. The representation of construction/building experts was interesting to me and there was some interesting commentary on land use and streamlining development processes.

I felt there was a bit of a lack of examples being pointed to as to how AI is changing the landscape. Autonomous agents and agent-based simulations were mentioned multiple times, but with the caveat that these systems are still in need of updating.

Ramesh mentioned the typical pathway for new technology; improve, transform, disrupt. It seems like right now, for agent-based models, we’re at the improvement phase.

I also liked a comment from Ramesh, again (I think!) about how the largest taxi company in the world right now doesn’t own any taxis (Uber, 13% market share). The same is true for the largest hotel company (Airbnb, in terms of listings).

Interesting stuff! And more to come for Insight Lane, I’m sure of it!