That's interesting, and in line with what I perceived as Uber's extreme focus on operations.
To me, the accelerometer DATA is the new and important thing -- it's the thing that taxi companies don't have.
Whether the machine learning model is "sophisticated" doesn't seem critical on the face of it.
I guess it depends whether there are a lot of non-pothole events that look like pothole events to "naive" signal processing. Do you need deep learning for this problem? I don't know but I would be skeptical without a citation.
But I am interested in more info and examples. If someone can give a bunch of examples I would adjust my view.
This is just nitpicking phrases at this point, a popular past time for us nerds, so I get it but it misses the point. "Sophisticated" is enough of a suitcase term that it's effectively worthless.
More importantly it's worth understanding that ML allows us to do things we couldn't do before, because it's cheaper and scales better than previous optimization methods, when you have the data.
So yes, the data infrastructure is the critical part, however the ML pipelines and Data Science work is what gives the massive multiplier at a cost/scale you can't get with traditional optimization methods.
Data is obviously crucial, but it's useless if it's just sitting on hard drive. Machine learning allows them to squeeze out as much juice from it as possible, and a few % point lift makes a huge difference at scale, especially in high volume businesses with low margins per transaction.
To me, the accelerometer DATA is the new and important thing -- it's the thing that taxi companies don't have.
Whether the machine learning model is "sophisticated" doesn't seem critical on the face of it.
I guess it depends whether there are a lot of non-pothole events that look like pothole events to "naive" signal processing. Do you need deep learning for this problem? I don't know but I would be skeptical without a citation.
But I am interested in more info and examples. If someone can give a bunch of examples I would adjust my view.