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Google Maps is one of the company’s most widely-used products, and its ability to predict upcoming traffic jams makes it indispensable for many drivers. Each day, says Google, more than 1 billion kilometers of road are driven with the app’s help. But, as the search giant explains in a blog post today, its features only work thanks machine learning tools from DeepMind, the London-based AI lab owned by Google’s parent company Alphabet.
In the blog post, Google and DeepMind researchers explain how they take data from various sources and feed it into machine learning models to predict traffic flows. This data includes live traffic information collected anonymously from Android devices, historical traffic data, information like speed limits…