Project Traffico (Traffic Observer) is a creative use of bus arrival times to detect traffic congestions. Every month, data for certain hotspots in Singapore are compiled and presented in the form of tables, charts and infographics under Statistics. Once a while, I also share some interesting observations under Stories.

I was looking at the infographics for last month and I saw something weird.

Unless it occurs regularly (e.g. every Sat afternoon along Punggol Road towards Sengkang at TPE junction), any congestion accumulated above 200 mins in a single day is unusual.

Time to investigate.

Let’s start by analysing Traffico data along Loyang Ave on (Thu) 3 Oct 2019. …

As a student, I wanted to understand how facial recognition is done in deep learning so for my final project in the Metis Data Science Bootcamp, I built a siamese network to learn the fundamentals. I also discovered that there are many open sourced projects and libraries that could be used to expedite the development of facial recognition applications.

Background

Facial recognition is used in many applications from taking attendance to checking in at hotels. …

Why I chose this topic for Project 4 in the Metis Data Science Bootcamp? This concerns every Singaporean. I am curious to know what people say about national issues. Before this bootcamp, I had no idea what NLP was but I had the impression that sentiment analysis is useful in predicting election outcomes; this is going to be very relevant as we head to the polls, soon.

Background

Every year, about 2 weeks after we celebrate our National Day in Singapore, the Prime Minister gives a National Day Rally (NDR) speech to talk about the challenges the country faces and how the government plans to address them. …

I recently enrolled in the Metis Data Science Bootcamp (Singapore) offered through Kaplan. Together with my ten classmates of varied backgrounds, we are the first cohort and we have survived the midway mark! It has been a pretty intensive but awesome experience so far. This is one of the projects I have completed.

Background

For my third (of five) project, I chose to use supervised learning to detect if a URL is phished or legit.

How is this important? I have a client who nearly had his email account hijacked through phishing. In fact, his supplier’s email was compromised and he received an invoice asking for payment to be deposited to another bank account number. Fortunately, he called his supplier for verification and discovered the fraud. …

Residents in Punggol should have heard the good news that the new link between Kallang-Paya Lebar (KPE) / Tampines Expressway (TPE) interchange and Punggol Central would be available by end Nov 2018, one year ahead of schedule. With another vital ingress and egress into and out of Punggol Town, the dynamics of Punggol road will surely change.

Here’s a simplified version of how it looks.

Typically, you enter or leave Punggol Town via the TPE, which is currently connected to Punggol Way or Punggol Road.

Before the dynamics of Punggol road are forever changed, I think it is a good time to do a recap. It all started with an analysis on bus arrival times and a conclusion that they can be used to infer traffic conditions along bus routes. Using this property, I built Project Traffico and set it up to monitor the top traffic hotspots in Singapore. Every month, congestion stats are tabulated and the most congested road wins the Snail Award. To date, quite unfortunately, roads along Punggol Road (TPE section) have won the award every month since inauguration. …

This article is heavily influenced by the work done in Project KAT

For some time, I have been intrigued by some local coffee chains with their shorthand notations of my favourite drink, TEH C SIEW-DAI (that’s tea with evaporated milk, less sweet):

• TC SD
• TC-
• TSi-

That got me looking back at the work I have done for Project KAT, which is now effectively version 1.0. After going through my notes, I found designs that I could work on to build my own version of shorthand notations. Since the general feedback for 1.0 is that it is too overwhelming (binary anyone?), …

Traffico (Traffic Observer) monitors bus arrival times to infer traffic conditions

In Part 1, I have shown that we can quite accurately compute the estimated journey time between bus stops through the use of backdated arrival times.

A straightforward application is to use them to infer traffic conditions. Indeed, I have always wanted to know how bad traffic congestions along Punggol Road are and now I am able to collect and visualise some real data.

Developers who are keen to determine the speed of traffic along roads should check out LTA’s Traffic Speed Band API. This API allows you to query the current traffic speeds on roads, expressed in speed bands. I am aware of this API but I still proceeded to build Traffico as an exercise. …

I use bus apps to check bus arrival times so that I can walk quickly to the bus stop to catch the arriving bus. Most of the time, I will make it but occasionally, 2 things happen:

• I rush to the bus stop and see the bus leaving — the ‘just missed the bus’ phenomenon
• I wait at the bus stop for the next couple of minutes seeing the ‘bus arriving’ message — the ‘bus arriving’ phenomenon

Curious, I analysed the bus arrival times available from the Application Programming Interface (API) at the LTA DataMall to look for clues. …