Uber’s problem space straddles the digital and physical worlds, making the nature of our engineering work particularly novel. According to Waleed Kadous, Principal Engineer at Uber, this duality inspires to look for technologies that can improve real-world mobility solutions at scale and in real-time. These efforts have led to harness innovative tools like conversational agents to build products that improve the lives of our users.
Franziska Bell, Director of Data Science at Uber, wants to give every Uber employee the capabilities of a data scientist. Fran and her team extend these capabilities throughout Uber through the use of platforms, systems that let users enter parameters and select sets of data to help make business decisions.
As a graduate student at UC Berkeley, Suzette Puente, Data Science Manager, used statistics to understand and explain animal mobility patterns. At Uber, Suzette and her team apply similar techniques to forecast traffic patterns. By leveraging spatio-temporal correlations, they can better predict travel time estimates and generate improved routes for driver-partners on our platform.