Microsoft Is Enabling Alaska To Reduce Car Deaths On Icy Roads

Around eight years ago, when he was still a station foreman at Alaska’s department of transportation, Dan Schacher noticed that winter temperatures began fluctuating between very cold and the kind of cold that causes a mixture of rain and snow to hit freezing concrete and turn into ice. “This year we had a rain event in January where we got six-tenths of an inch of rain, which is absolutely unheard of, at this time of year,” Schacher said. “Even the old timers don’t remember very many of these events.” Now the DOT’s Fairbanks District maintenance superintendent, Schacher finds that relying on intuition and experience no longer suffice to plan road maintenance. In partnership with internet-of-things company Fathym, he instead relies on data collection and machine learning.

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