The ceremony, hosted by House Speaker Mike Johnson, honored Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan, Mary Jackson, and Dr. Christine Darden of NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, along with all the other women who served at the agency and its precursor, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, or the NACA, as computers, mathematicians, and engineers.

In her remarks, Shetterly noted that even as the Hidden Figures made such key contributions to NASA and the NACA before it, they remained active in their communities, leading Girl Scout troops and delivering meals to the hungry.

Using AI, we identify possible adjustments to traffic light timing. We share these adjustments as actionable recommendations with the city. The city’s traffic engineers review the recommendations, approve them, and they can easily implement them in as little as 5 minutes, using the city's existing policies and tools.

No, all recommendations are based on driving trends from Google Maps and are then implemented by the city using the city’s existing systems and equipment.

In 2015, President Barack Obama presented Katherine Johnson with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor.

Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson of Texas, who passed away in 2023, introduced H.R. 1396 – Hidden Figures Congressional Gold Medal Act on Feb. 27, 2019. It was signed into law later that year.

We are currently in the early research phase and offering Green Light to partner cities at no cost. Our primary goal of this product is to support cities’ sustainability goals.

LightOn

Green Light uses AI and Google Maps driving trends, with one of the strongest understandings of global road networks, to model traffic patterns and build intelligent recommendations for city traffic engineers to optimize traffic flow. Early numbers indicate a potential for up to 30% reduction in stops and 10% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions (1). By optimizing each intersection, and coordinating between adjacent intersections, we can create waves of green lights and help cities further reduce stop-and-go traffic. Green Light is now live in over 70 intersections in 13 cities, 4 continents, from Haifa, Israel to Bangalore, India to Hamburg, Germany – and in these intersections we are able to save fuel and lower emissions for up to 30M car rides monthly.Â

We create a model to understand how traffic flows through the intersection. This helps us understand typical traffic patterns including patterns of starting and stopping, average wait times at a traffic light, coordination between adjacent intersections (or lack thereof), and how traffic light plans change throughout the day.

A simple turn of phrase was all it took for U.S. Sen. Shelley Moore Capito of Katherine Johnson’s home state of West Virginia to capture the feeling in Emancipation Hall at the U.S. Capitol in Washington.

The Green Light dashboard provides city-specific actionable recommendations, showing supporting trends for each recommendation, with the option to accept or reject the suggestion. After a recommendation has been implemented, the dashboard shows an impact analysis report.

“It’s been said that Katherine Johnson counted everything,” she said. “But today we’re here to celebrate the one thing even she couldn’t count, and that’s the impact that she and her colleagues have had on the lives of students, teachers, and explorers.”

Andrea Mosie, senior Apollo sample processor and lab manager who oversees the 842 pounds of Apollo lunar samples, accepted the medal awarded to all NASA’s Hidden Figures. She began her career at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston in the 1970s.

IC-LightAI

We measure how many stops we’ve saved for drivers, and its impact on traffic patterns. We then use industry standards models to calculate the climate impact of these changes. We share this with the partner city and continue monitoring for any future needed changes.

“The pioneers we honor today, these Hidden Figures — their courage and imagination brought us to the Moon. And their lessons, their legacy, will send us back to the Moon,” said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson.

LyteAI

“They spent countless hours tutoring kids so that those kids, too, would see the power and the beauty of numbers they believed in, tending to the small D democracy that binds us to each other as neighbors and as American citizens,” she said.

Road transportation is responsible for a significant amount of global and urban greenhouse gas emissions. It is especially problematic at city intersections where pollution can be 29 times higher than on open roads.  At intersections, half of these emissions come from traffic accelerating after stopping. While some amount of stop-and-go traffic is unavoidable, part of it is preventable through the optimization of traffic light timing configurations. To improve traffic light timing, cities need to either install costly hardware or run manual vehicle counts; both of these solutions are expensive and don’t provide all the necessary information.

If you are a city representative or traffic engineer and are interested in joining the waiting list, please complete this form.

Green Light reflects Google Research's commitment to use AI to address climate change and improve millions of lives in cities around the world.

Once a city signs an agreement with Green Light, they get access to our interface, where city officials can view suggested recommendations, supporting information, and monitor their measured impact on emissions and traffic flow.

When we start working with a city, the Green Light algorithm investigates driving patterns through the city, uses insights from Google Maps, and provides recommendations for intersections to optimize, based on the expected impact of the optimization. For example, if a traffic light at a certain intersection is already on the best possible plan, the system would not provide a recommendation for it.

A film adaptation of the book starring Taraji Henson as Johnson, Octavia Spencer as Vaughan, and Janelle Monáe as Jackson came out later that year and further elevated the topic. NASA participated under a Space Act Agreement with 20th Century Fox in activities around the movie, to provide historical guidance and advice during the filmmaking process.

Green Light only shares recommendations about how a city should optimize traffic light timing - for example if they should add additional seconds of “green time” to a particular part of the traffic light cycle. User data is never shared with the city or any other third party.Â

Author Margot Lee Shetterly detailed the stories of the women from NASA Langley in her 2016 nonfiction book “Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Who Helped Win the Space Race.” Though the book focused on NASA Langley, where Shetterly’s father worked, it helped raise awareness of similar stories around NASA.

Mosie thanked Congress for supporting NASA’s campaign to send the first woman and first person of color to the Moon as part of Artemis and the agency’s efforts to provide “opportunities for people, more representative of the way our country looks, to understand humanity’s place in the universe.”

Building on our decades-long effort to map cities across the world, we can infer existing traffic light parameters including: cycle length, transition time, green split (i.e. right-of-way time and order), coordination and sensor operation (actuation).

Green Light algorithms will continue to monitor all relevant metrics, and two weeks after implementation a full impact analysis report will be uploaded to the interface for city engineers to review.

Clipdrop

NASA explores the unknown in air and space, innovates for the benefit of humanity, and inspires the world through discovery.

Relight

Family members of Johnson, Vaughan, Jackson and Dr. Darden accepted medals on their behalves. Dr. Darden watched the ceremony from home.

No. Our system offers better plans based on aggregated anonymous data to improve traffic flow for everyone: Google and non Google users, car drivers, taxi drivers, buses and all other users of the road.

That sense of admiration and awe toward the legacy and impact of NASA’s Hidden Figures was palpable Wednesday during a Congressional Gold Medal Ceremony to honor the women’s work and achievements during the space race.

“I am humbled by the significant contributions and lasting impact of these women to America’s aeronautics and space programs. Their brilliance and perseverance still echo not just through the halls of NASA Langley, but through the entire Agency,” said NASA Langley’s Acting Center Director Dawn Schaible. “They are an inspiration to me and countless others who have benefited from the paths they forged.”