Jon Froehlich and his students' project highlighted in New Scientist

The New Scientist featured an article on the work of Jon Froehlich and his students Kotaro Hara and Victoria Le, which focuses on mobile accessibility.

Using crowd sourcing, Google Street View and computer vision, Dr. Froehlich and his team identify accessibility obstacles in streets and sidewalks. Their objective is to not only provide information to municipalities but also build a data source for new accessibility-aware navigation tools for mobility and/or vision impaired persons, so that they can determine the accessibility of an area a priori before embarking on a route. The team's software allows untrained crowdsourced workers to zoom through the streets using Google Street View and find and label the potholes, obstructed pathways, broken kerbs and missing ramps. A report that includes images of highlighted problem areas can then be generated for the local council's road-mending crews to act on.

Their paper, "Combining Crowdsourcing and Google Street View to Identify Street-level Accessibility Problems", has been accepted to the CHI 2013 conference and will be presented in April at Paris.