Anantha Kancherla — Building Level 5 Autonomous Vehicles

As Lyft’s VP of Engineering, Software at Level 5, Autonomous Vehicle Program, Anantha Kancherla has a birds-eye view on what it takes to make self-driving cars work in the real world. He previously worked on Windows at Microsoft focusing on DirectX, Graphics and UI; Facebook’s mobile Newsfeed and core mobile experiences; and led the Collaboration efforts at Dropbox involving launching Dropbox Paper as well as improving core collaboration functionality in Dropbox. He and Lukas dive into the challenges of working on large projects and how to approach breaking down a major project into pieces, tracking progress and addressing bugs. Check out Lyft’s Self-Driving Website: https://self-driving.lyft.com/ And this article on building the self-driving team at Lyft: https://medium.com/lyftlevel5/going-from-zero-to-sixty-building-lyfts-self-driving-software-team-1ac693800588 Follow Lyft Level 5 on Twitter: https://twitter.com/LyftLevel5 Topics covered: 0:00 Sharp Knives 0:44 Introduction 1:07 Breaking down a big goal 8:15 Breaking down Metrics 10:50 Allocating Resources 12:40 Interventions 13:27 What part still has lots ofroom for improvement? 14:25 Various ways of deploying models 15:30 Rideshare 15:57 Infrastructure, updates 17:28 Model versioning 19:16 Model improvement goals 22:42 Unit testing 25:12 Interactions of models 26:30 Improvements in data vs models 29:50 finding the right data 30:38 Deploying models into production 32:17 Feature drift 34:20 When to file bug tickets 37:25 Processes and growth 40:56 Underrated aspect 42:34 Biggest challenges Visit our podcasts homepage for transcripts and more episodes! www.wandb.com/podcast 🔊 Get our podcast on Apple and Spotify! Apple Podcasts: https://bit.ly/2WdrUvI Spotify: https://bit.ly/2SqtadF