Related programmes and teams Section 1.6 The Turing’s response to COVID-19 Data-centric engineering Research Engineering Helping London to navigate “There was an urgency and safely a passion among our team to contribute to the fight against As the pandemic took hold in spring 2020, a developed for the air pollution project, so that the virus. We wanted to help team in the Turing’s data-centric engineering the data could be processed quicker and in whatever way we could.” programme began to monitor activity on the more securely. streets of London. Their goal: to understand The result of the work was a piece of Theo Damoulas how lockdown was affecting city life, and software (an ‘Application Programming Leader of Project Odysseus what interventions were needed to allow Interface’) that the authorities could use to and Turing AI Fellow the city’s nine million people to keep socially analyse the anonymised, near real-time data, The Alan Turing Institute distanced. allowing them to monitor pedestrian density Named Project Odysseus, this was a rapid and make social distancing interventions repurposing of an existing project that had where required. TfL says that it implemented been combining data from various sources over 700 such interventions at the height of in order to estimate and forecast the city’s air the pandemic’s first wave, such as moving “This collaboration has not pollution. Working with the Greater London bus stops, widening pavements and closing only succeeded in knowledge Authority (GLA) and Transport for London parking bays, and that the Turing’s tool transfer, but has also created (TfL), the team modified its air pollution provided key data for those decisions. a lasting legacy that we intend algorithms, feeding them with data from Looking forward, the researchers are to build on.” London’s traffic cameras and sensors to hoping to work with the GLA to monitor high estimate pedestrian and vehicle densities street activity as London recovers from the Paul Hodgson and distances. The Turing’s Research pandemic, to help understand how social Senior Manager for City Data Engineering team also played a crucial role and commercial activity has been affected. GLA’s City Intelligence Unit by honing the infrastructure that had been

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