Engineers at NTT DoCoMo have created an app that helps taxi drivers in Japan go where the passengers are. Rather than relying on apps to connect amateur drivers with passengers, NTT DoCoMo data scientists use anonymized data from cell phone signals to detect where people are congregating.

It then uses deep learning algorithms running on an NVIDIA DGX-1 supercomputer to map that data to information collected by taxi drivers about demand for their services.

To predict demand based on cell phone usage, NTT DoCoMo uses stacked denoising autoencoder algorithms—a relatively new deep learning technique that allows machines to tease patterns out of seemingly random input.

The company delivers information via an app about where passengers can be found to an app that taxi drivers can access from a touchscreen.

The results have been uncannily accurate. Rolled out 15 February to 1,350 taxis in Tokyo and another 1,150 taxis in Nagoya, Japan, NTT DoCoMo’s app has steered taxis toward passengers with an accuracy rate of 92.9%.