Jim Greer, CTO/COO of Central Florida Expressway Authority (CFX), is a popular executive around town. In fact, because his contact information and budget are a matter of public record, he sometimes gets ambushed in the parking lot outside his office by area businesspeople pitching ideas, seeking the chance to do business with him.
“Me and my team are inundated with opportunities,” he said during an April 30 UCF Business Incubation Program presentation at UCF Downtown.
Specifically, they get a host of proposals to provide infrastructure operation improvements for the transportation agency. In fact, there are so many to consider, that at times he and his team lack the means to discern the most viable ones.
Related: Transportation jams plague the region's growth. How do we fix it?
Greer met the Currus AI team last November at one of the incubator's events, and less than two months later, the two groups started having meetings. Currus AI, an Orlando tech firm founded in 2021, then built a deep learning program that quickly can assess the relevance of every proposal that comes Greer’s way.
"Working with the computer program... it has been a tremendous time savings for my team," Greer said. "As far as pain points, we really haven't had any yet.”
Vice President Yassir Fallah of Currus AI told Orlando Inno his company’s core technology is connected AI, and next up is the creation of a system that uses computer vision to produce very detailed real-time information about lane level traffic and road events, using CFX’s existing cameras.
During the April 30 panel discussion, Greer said the expressway authority's mission is to support the local community, but it’s easy for small, local startups to be outshined by the robust tech marketplace on the West Coast. He said Currus AI’s presence in the UCF Business Incubation Program made the company stand out.
Related: Here's how Central Florida's sprawling development pattern drives future transportation solutions
“This was an opportunity for us that we were very fortunate to walk into. Our revenue comes from the Central Florida area, and we want to give as much of that revenue back to Central Florida as possible. We try to give [companies in the area] first swing at the ball," he said.
The partnership between the two organizations showcases the potential for technological innovation to drive improvements in public services. While Currus AI’s initial project was to help CFX sort and prioritize proposals, the work didn’t stop there, thanks to the firm's digital-twin technology.
“We're giving them access to the cameras on our roadway. They're applying their technology to see if they can [direct] counterflow traffic in certain situations,” said Greer during the event. “We don’t want any false positives, right? Sometimes we hear about AI being confidently wrong, and we want to avoid that [because it would cause] serious safety issues on highway. We want to make sure we [have] something we can deploy system-wide once we get past this pilot stage."
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