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

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