1. Training an AI to generate FixMyStreet reports

    Artificial intelligence and machine learning seem to be everywhere at the moment – every day there’s a new story about the latest smart assistant, self-driving car or the impending take over of the world by robots. With FixMyStreet having recently reached one million reports, I started wondering what kind of fun things could be done with that dataset.

    Inspired by a recent post that generated UK place names using a neural network, I thought I’d dip my toes in the deep learning sea and apply the same technique to FixMyStreet reports. Predictably enough the results are a bit weird.

    I took the titles from all the public reports on fixmystreet.com as the training data, and left the training process to run overnight. The number crunching was pretty slow and the calculations had barely reached 5% in the morning. I suspect the training set was a bit too large, at over 1M entries, but end result still gives enough to work with.

    The training process produces checkpoints along the way, which you can use to see how the learning is progressing. After 1000 iterations the model was starting to be aware that it should use words, but didn’t really know how to spell them:

    Mertricolbes
    Ice does thrown campryings
    Sunky riking proper, badger verwappefing cars off uping is!
    Finst Knmp
    Lyghimes Jn fence
    Moadle bridge is one descemjop
    

    After 15000 iterations it’s starting to get the hang of real words, though still struggling to form coherent sentences.

    Untaxed cacistance.
    Broken Surface in ARRUIGARDUR. Widdy movering
    Cracked already nail some house height avenue.
    Light not worky
    I large pot hole
    Dumped shood road nod at street.
    Grim
    Dog man
    Ongorently obstructing sofas. This birgs.
    Serious Dirches
    

    After 68000 iterations there seems to be enough confusion in the training data that things start to go south again with the default parameters:

    Urgely councille at jnc swept arobley men.
    They whention to public bend to street? For traffic light not working
    

    Tweaking the ‘temperature’ of the sampling process produces increasingly sensible results:

    Large crumbling on pavement
    Potholes all overgrown for deep pothole
    Very van causing the road
    Very deep potholes on pavement
    Weeds on the pavement
    Several potholes in the road
    Rubbish Dumped on the road markings
    Potholes on three away surface blocking my peride garden of the pavement
    Potholes and rubbish bags on pavement
    Poor road sign damaged
    Poor street lights not working
    Dog mess in can on road bollard on pavement
    A large potholes and street light post in middle of road
    

    As well as plenty of variations on the most popular titles:

    Pot hole
    Pot hole on pavement
    Pot holes and pavement around
    Pot holes needings to path
    Pothole
    Pothole dark
    Pothole in road
    Pothole/Damaged to to weeks
    Potholes
    Potholes all overgrown for deep pothole
    Potholes in Cavation Close
    Potholes in lamp post Out
    Potholes in right stop lines sign
    Potholes on Knothendabout
    Street Light
    Street Lighting
    Street light
    Street light fence the entranch to Parver close
    Street light not working
    Street light not working develter
    Street light out opposite 82/00 Tood
    Street lights
    Street lights not working in manham wall post
    Street lights on path
    Street lights out
    

    It also seems to do quite well at making up road names that don’t exist in any of the original reports (or in reality):

    Street Light Out - 605 Ridington Road
    Signs left on qualing Road, Leave SE2234
    4 Phiphest Park Road Hasnyleys Rd
    Apton flytipping on Willour Lane
    The road U6!
    

    Here are a few of my favourites for their sheer absurdity:

    Huge pothole signs
    Lack of rubbish
    Wheelie car
    Keep Potholes
    Mattress left on cars
    Ant flat in the middle of road
    Flytipping goon!
    Pothole on the trees
    Abandoned rubbish in lane approaching badger toward Way ockgatton trees
    Overgrown bush Is broken - life of the road.
    Poo car
    Road missing
    Missing dog fouling - under traffic lights
    

    Aside from perhaps generating realistic-looking reports for demo/development sites I don’t know if this has any practical application for FixMyStreet, but it was fun to see what kind of thing is possible with not much work.


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    Image: Scott Lynch (CC by/2.0)