• December 01, 2022

    UW PI Jon Froehlich was Interviewed by Seattle Times on Sidewalk Accessibility

    Last month, PacTrans PI and UW Associate Professor of Computer Science Engineering, Jon Froehlich, was interviewed by the Seattle Times as part of an article titled, “WA faces an epidemic of inaccessible sidewalks.” The article aptly describes that unless there is network time accessibility, a single location’s accessibility (an apartment complex being sidewalk accessible, for example) is irrelevant. They point out that many places across the state of Washington suffer from a lack of network wide sidewalk accessibility.

    “There’s not enough research and follow-up and accountability,” Froehlich said. Professor Jon Froehlich is working to hone a form of artificial intelligence that can accurately assess public infrastructure without physically counting each ramp or signal button. This work, called project sidewalk, uses Google street view, and other similar imagery; and crowdsourcing to identify gaps in accessibility. The web application that his lab has developed also has a suite of automated analytical and visualization tools once these gaps have been identified.

    PacTrans has funded two projects led by Professor Froehlich on this subject, and in large part due to these efforts, he received this year’s PacTrans Outstanding Researcher Award.