Students sitting together at the AI-CIC in Scottsdale on July 23.

ASU students lead in AI development for local police department

ANNIE DAVIS

August 5, 2025

Whether you’re making your morning commute, you’re on the way to class or just trying to make it clear across town, you’ve probably run into a traffic problem or two.

Reporting an issue can help local police departments address ongoing traffic problems, and contribute to the overall safety of the community.

Coming soon, the police department in Chandler will have an all new traffic reporting web portal, thanks to a collaboration with ASU’s Artificial Intelligence Cloud Innovation Center, powered by AWS.

Known as the AI-CIC, the partnership between ASU and AWS expands innovation from campus to community by working with local organizations – like the Chandler Police Department – to help advance the use of AI in the public sector.

Team members from both ASU and AWS work together at the AI-CIC, located at ASU’s Skysong Innovation Center. They collaborate with local organizations to tackle problems – or unlock opportunities – by designing AI solutions that use cutting-edge cloud computing technologies.

“The City of Chandler has built a strong identity of being innovative, with technology being part of that,” said Colleen Pyra Schwab, the AWS lead at the AI-CIC. “We identified early on that operational inefficiencies are ripe for the kind innovations we could work on together.”

And over the course of six months, the AI-CIC team would meet regularly with Chandler PD to scope a project and review and revise its traffic reporting web portal. And ASU students played a central role in the design and development.

Read: ASU and AWS collaborate to promote AI transformation on a global scale

Working with tomorrow's leaders

Every semester, the AI-CIC employs a group of student workers from across disciplines to support designing these solutions.

“It’s a unique opportunity for our students to get experience with real-world project work and partners,” said John Rome, deputy CIO and executive sponsor for the AI-CIC. “At ASU, we’re focused on AI-ready graduates and opportunities like this support that goal.”

Working alongside Schwab, fellow AWS tech lead Arun Arunachalam and program manager Tom Orr, four students collaborated to help understand and tackle this particular challenge.

Citizens in Chandler can currently submit traffic issues via multiple channels: completing a form on the Chandler PD website, calling the non-emergency phone line or talking directly to a police officer. According to Lieutenant Dan McQuillin, the existing solution for tracking incidents is rather cumbersome.

A group of student workers, including Ganesh Madduri, Matthew Brummund, Arpita Mandal and Saran Ramesh, took on various roles to revamp the web portal — from user experience and back-end processing.

Mandal and Ramesh redesigned the web portal’s user interface. They used responsive design techniques that made completing the form easier for citizens and built integrations with the police officer portal.

Meanwhile Madduri and Brummund focused on the back-end portal for the department, where reports are tracked and assigned to officers. They designed interactive dashboards that log details of the complaint, including location, timing and more.

Perhaps most impressive was the visualization components built into the dashboard. The team took a map of Chandler and overlaid the various beats – geographically defined sections of the city assigned to specific officers – with a heat map to showcase where the most traffic reports occur.

With a better visualization of where reports are occurring, they also designed an AI-driven feature that allows the department to fact find quickly, asking questions like “Can you show me the cases that are tagged as speeding?” or “Which beat has open reports?”

The officer can use the chat feature to send emails directly to officers in the field.

The AI-powered feature is built using Lex, the same feature that powers Amazon’s Alexa. “We focused on finding the right tool for the right use case,” shared Brummund.

“The complexity of the project and success of the students should be celebrated,” said Arunachalam. “Deploying in a customer environment is a huge task…a lot of hard work and meticulous planning went into it by these students.”

In an effort to support digital transformation across the valley, the team designs all solutions as open source that can be re-engineered for other user-generated inquiries.

Learn more about the AI-CIC and open-source solutions at: https://cic.asu.edu/