sacha arnoud
lyft level 5
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The Research and Applied AI Summit (RAAIS) is a community for entrepreneurs and researchers who accelerate the science and applications of AI technology. We’ve been running for 6 years now and have hosted over fifty entrepreneurs and academics who have built billion-dollar companies and published foundational papers that drive the AI field forward.
In the lead up to our 6th annual event that will be broadcast live online on the 26th June 2020, we’re running a series of speaker profiles highlighting what you can expect to learn on the day!
Autonomous driving
The development of autonomous vehicles is one of the largest and potentially most impactful engineering challenges in modern AI. The problems within this domain are diverse, ranging from building next-generation sensors that help perceive, understand and model the real-world, creating reliable and robust prediction models across the software stack. To accomplish this, billions of dollars have and continue to be invested by several large companies, including Waymo, Lyft, GM/Cruise, Uber, Tesla, and Apple.
From storage systems at Sun, to geo at Google, and ultimately self-driving at Lyft
Sacha Arnoud began his career designing and building storage systems at Sun Microsystems. Following a 7 year stint at the company, Sacha made his way to Google via the acquisition of Aardvark in 2010. The startup developed a system for rapid question/answering by human experts in your network. At Google, Sacha worked on cutting edge Mapping projects. In particular, he spearheaded efforts to create and productionize one of the first Computer Vision systems heavily relying on Deep Learning across Google. These pipelines enabled data-mining geospatial imagery at global scale (eg, Street View, aerial imagery, satellite imagery, etc) to extract valuable geo-information such as road segments, street signs, house numbers, street names, building footprints, and more. This derived data became critical to power Google Maps, as well as a growing number of new use cases.
From there, Sacha moved into Waymo to lead Google’s newly spun-off autonomous driving company’s perception and ML infrastructure teams. During his 3.5 years at the company, Waymo launched their consumer-facing ride-hailing service, Waymo One, in Arizona and began training their autonomous trucking service, Waymo Via, in Texas and Arizona.
Now, Sacha is the Senior Director of Engineering at Lyft Level 5, the division of Lyft that is responsible for developing consumer-facing self-driving vehicles for the Lyft ride-hailing service. There, he joins Luc Vincent, who took us through the 0 to 1 journey of Lyft Level 5 only two years ago at RAAIS 2018.
Ahead of RAAIS 2020, Lyft Level 5 released an exciting new dataset called the Prediction Dataset, which is their largest release yet. This dataset is interesting because it focuses on predicting the motion of traffic agents such as cars, cyclists, and pedestrians. The release includes a paper and SDK, followed by an upcoming Kaggle competition.
