Multiplicity and tutorial ideas

OK so yesterday's lecture was about multiplicity and reiterated the idea of collective intelligence. So in today's tute, we explored these ideas further, and were assigned into groups and were given the task of thinking up an idea for a website that utilized collective intelligence. My group had the idea of using collective intelligence to track cars around a city in real time.

The basic idea was to give every registered car a free small G.P.S tracking device. This device then would then be able to provide the cars location in real time. All the data from all the cars would then be shown on a website with a map interface, as a white dot. This would enable people to see in real time, where the all the traffic jams, road accidents and delays are. People could then use the website to plan routes and avoid traffic congestion. This would then save on time, fuel and carbon emissions.

This service data could also be utilized by governments to plan future road works and create greater traffic conditions, which would also improve on time, fuel and carbon emissions. The data would be recorded and anybody could look back on previous records to see different traffic patterns and problems.

The problems with this idea is that it would take a massive amount of server space both to host and to process the data in real time and there would be a slight privacy concern.

This idea would be completely impossible without the use of collective intelligence, as without the collective co-operation of car driver using the G.P.S tracking device, the data would never be collected or utilized.

Anyway this is the basic idea of our tute presentation. I hope this might inspire some people. ols out