4 ways AI could make airports more tolerable
Is it possible that a combination of computer vision and AI could make airports more tolerable? Implementing these technologies won’t build larger airports or reduce the number of passengers, but it could offer a unique solution to airport wait times.
The impact of AI on our lives is going to be profound in coming years, and the same is true of computer vision. When you combine the two technologies, you get a real recipe for improving the airport experience.
A lot of the issues we see with air travel today are a direct result of our inability to compute all the potential combinations and permutations. We have multiple security stops at airports because we believe that every step makes us safer. But it’s not necessarily true that the more checks and balances we add, the more likely we are to catch the bad guys. The problem isn’t the number of steps in a security check — it’s human error.
AI has the ability to process information at a staggering rate and to correlate data that even the most intuitive TSA agent might not see.
The airport experience is going to change dramatically over the next decade. Every step of the journey will be affected — from security to queuing to baggage claim. Here are four ways we will likely see AI and computer vision transform air travel in the future.
We spend a large portion of our time in airports waiting on delayed flights. Anything from bad weather to a mechanical issue can hold a plane up for hours. When you use big data and machine learning to approach the problem, you have the ability to replace on-the-spot analysis with highly correlative pattern analysis to better prepare the airport for setbacks. This would allow airlines to route delayed passengers dynamically before they even made it to the airport.
Maintaining and analyzing maintenance logs with supervised learning could also protect airlines from sudden failures. This technology could flag planes that are in need of maintenance and dynamically reallocate aircraft accordingly.
Human TSA agents will never be better at performing security checks than a supervised learning algorithm would be.
