Fysical & Johns Hopkins Carey Business School Partner for Machine Learning Research

Johns Hopkins Carey Business School is partnering with Fysical to use its location data to power testing and training data for its Machine Learning courses.

What is Machine Learning?

Machine Learning is a branch of artificial intelligence. It is the science of getting computers to act without being explicitly programmed. Since the millennium, machine learning has given us self-driving cars, speech recognition, effective web search, and a vastly improved understanding of the human genome.

How is location data used?

Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence are only as good as the data they ingest. This data is called ‘training data’. Algorithms learn from this data, and use it to make decisions.

How can society benefit from Machine Learning and location data?

Here are some of the bigger questions in society that location data can allow Machine Learning to solve:

• Bus routes can be optimized (and fuel saved) based on the number of people detected waiting at bus stops.
• In the event of a disaster (ie fire or earthquake) first responders can locate people in need of help in a building / disrupted area.
• The origin of a disease outbreak can be identified. If a group of people scattered throughout the country get sick with a disease (ie Zika Virus), then health officials can analyze their historical journeys to identify when they were all in the same area and became infected. Then, researchers can proactively alert others at that same location to take preventative care.
• Dementia patients that wander out of hospital wards can be returned.
• Economists can more accurately forecast the health of the US economy by looking at consumer travel and shopping activity.
• Banks can more accurately detect fraud. If they see you are currently in Florida, but your credit card is being used in New York this can be used as an alert.
• Academic researchers can analyze the impact of immigration and emigration of specific countries / geographies.

Fysical powering innovation

Fysical’s purpose is to power innovation across a variety of industries using location data. We’re glad to partner with educational institutions striving to make world a better place with us together.