My new job at Lyft
In October, I joined Lyft as Data Science Manager for Core Mapping. I wish I could have posted this update a while ago but a big event got in the way (yes, we went public) ... While low visibility, Mapping turns out to a big deal for ride-sharing as it has influence on a lot of other services. In a nutshell, Mapping has an impact on pricing, driver dispatch, scheduled rides and customer XP. Also, it is usually the biggest friction point for seamless pickups. Why is Mapping important for ride sharing company ? Mapping has traditionally 4 components: Basemap (representation of the world as a graph), Locations (where are drivers, passengers ?), Routing (optimal paths between locations) and ETA (distance and time between locations). When you open your app, you see the following screen: A lot of information displayed is connected to the work by my team: The surrounding physical world : road segments, (train) stations, POI The pick-up ETA (3min) looks at drivers around t