By Michael Cheng
As part of Facebook’s long-standing commitment to open standards and the open source community, we have shared data sets and models to help global organizations. We are using our expertise — including a predictive model for mapping electrical grids, disaster maps , and more accurate population density maps — to improve access to this type of technology. Today, we are pleased to announce our participation as a founding member of the new Urban Computing Foundation (UCF).
Formed by the Linux Foundation, UCF will provide a forum for developers to collaborate on and build a common set of open source tools to improve mobility, safety, road infrastructure, traffic congestion, and energy consumption in connected cities. UCF will establish a neutral space for this critical work, including adapting geospatial and temporal machine learning techniques for urban environments and developing simulation methodologies for modeling and predicting citywide phenomena.
Facebook will serve on the UCF Technical Advisory Committee and help create and maintain a neutral framework and open ecosystem of tools and resources for developers to build the next generation of urban planning technologies.
UCF’s mission has the potential to not only minimize pollution, congestion, and consumption but also to ensure that technology has a positive impact on urban landscapes. We look forward to working with the Linux Foundation and other partners to create a network of open source tools and resources for developers.
