Here’s an interesting competition that may well lend itself to R: the IEEE International Conference on Data Mining is running a contest to find the best way of predicting traffic problems. There are three separate contests:

• Predicting congestion: a series of measurements from 10 selected road segments is given and the goal is to make short-term predictions of future values based on historical ones.
• Predicting traffic jams: input data contain identifiers of road segments closed due to roadworks, accompanied by a sequence of segments where the first jams occurred.
• Predicting traffic from individual drivers: the large input data set consists of a stream of notifications from 1% of vehicles about their current GPS locations in the city road network, sent every 10 seconds.

Prizes worth $5,000 will be awarded to the winners, and the competition closes on September 30. For details, see the link below.

IEEE ICDM Contest: Road Traffic Prediction for Intelligent GPS Navigation