How Teleport uses machine vision to peek into every street corner

I’ve teased my readers before on how AI will reorganize the human population. Just like online dating sites are letting AI decide who gets to make babies with whom, we’re letting AI decide who’s moving where. So…

How exactly do we decide what’s a good city these days?

We read the news, hear good things from our friends, see photos and videos, get the best job offers from there, and quite often, we often just go and see the city.

I’m not going to get into how AI is already involved in deciding which news, friends’ posts, videos or photos of cities we get to see, but I am going to shed some light into how we use AI at Teleport to help you see cities more objectively. And since I’m obsessed with convincing every kid to start coding, then I’m going to walk through the process with simple code examples to illustrate how easy it is to get started playing with AI with all the tools out there already.

The following ideas were mainly inspired by MIT’s StreetScore project.

Visiting cities through the eyes of AI

An obvious benefit of using software to visit places is that Newton ain’t got nothing on software bots and they can accelerate their way through thousands of places in a heartbeat without worrying about their mass (in case you did not know — heartbeat is a well known time unit measure under International System of Units).

So let’s grab the borders of Tartu, Estonia (my university town) from the Teleport Developers API and generate 10 000 random geographical coordinates to visit. Why 10K you might ask? Because science!