The Busking Bus-Stop

Client: Ian Lewis, Cambridge Infrastructure Investment <ijl20@cam.ac.uk>

Cambridge buses are fitted with GPS tracking equipment. This is used to predict the arrival time for the next bus, as displayed on many bus-stops around the city. It is also collected in an archive of all bus journeys. It would be nice if the display provided more information, and did so in a more entertaining way, customised depending on how long the bus will take to arrive. Information snippets might include confidence intervals (in layman's terms) for actual arrival time based on historic data, and comparisons to other journey options. Entertainment might be automatically generated poems, fictional dialogues etc, that adapt intelligently to local context such as weather information, news stories and so on - but at a length appropriate to the remaining time. With luck, we hope to deploy the resulting system - at least on the stop outside the Gates building!