Drago Anguelov — Robustness, Safety, and Scalability at Waymo

Drago Anguelov — Robustness, Safety, and Scalability at Waymo

Author: Lukas Biewald July 14, 2022 Duration: 1:09:01

Drago Anguelov is a Distinguished Scientist and Head of Research at Waymo, an autonomous driving technology company and subsidiary of Alphabet Inc.

We begin by discussing Drago's work on the original Inception architecture, winner of the 2014 ImageNet challenge and introduction of the inception module. Then, we explore milestones and current trends in autonomous driving, from Waymo's release of the Open Dataset to the trade-offs between modular and end-to-end systems.

Drago also shares his thoughts on finding rare examples, and the challenges of creating scalable and robust systems.

Show notes (transcript and links): http://wandb.me/gd-drago-anguelov

---

⏳ Timestamps:

0:00 Intro

0:45 The story behind the Inception architecture

13:51 Trends and milestones in autonomous vehicles

23:52 The challenges of scalability and simulation

30:19 Why LiDar and mapping are useful

35:31 Waymo Via and autonomous trucking

37:31 Robustness and unsupervised domain adaptation

40:44 Why Waymo released the Waymo Open Dataset

49:02 The domain gap between simulation and the real world

56:40 Finding rare examples

1:04:34 The challenges of production requirements

1:08:36 Outro

---

Connect with Drago & Waymo

📍 Drago on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dragomiranguelov/

📍 Waymo on Twitter: https://twitter.com/waymo/

📍 Careers at Waymo: https://waymo.com/careers/

---

Links:

📍 Inception v1: https://arxiv.org/abs/1409.4842

📍 "SPG: Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for 3D Object Detection via Semantic Point Generation", Qiangeng Xu et al. (2021), https://arxiv.org/abs/2108.06709

📍 "GradTail: Learning Long-Tailed Data Using Gradient-based Sample Weighting", Zhao Chen et al. (2022), https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.05938

---

💬 Host: Lukas Biewald

📹 Producers: Cayla Sharp, Angelica Pan, Lavanya Shukla

---

Subscribe and listen to our podcast today!

👉 Apple Podcasts: http://wandb.me/apple-podcasts​​

👉 Google Podcasts: http://wandb.me/google-podcasts​

👉 Spotify: http://wandb.me/spotify​


Lukas Biewald hosts Gradient Dissent: Conversations on AI, a series that moves beyond theoretical discussions to examine how artificial intelligence is actually built and deployed. Each episode features a direct, unscripted talk with a leading practitioner-you’ll hear from engineers and researchers at places like NVIDIA, Meta, Google, Lyft, and OpenAI. The focus is on the tangible challenges and breakthroughs they encounter, from initial research to the complex reality of putting models into production. This isn't about abstract futures; it's a grounded look at the decisions shaping the field right now. Biewald, bringing his perspective from Weights & Biases, steers conversations toward the practical trade-offs and collaborative efforts that define modern AI work. For anyone in technology or business who wants to understand the mechanics behind the headlines, this podcast offers a rare, candid window into the process. You’ll come away with a clearer sense of how ideas become functional systems and what it really takes to operate at the cutting edge.
Author: Language: English Episodes: 100

Gradient Dissent: Conversations on AI
Podcast Episodes
Evaluating LLMs with Chatbot Arena and Joseph E. Gonzalez [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 55:32
In this episode of Gradient Dissent, Joseph E. Gonzalez, EECS Professor at UC Berkeley and Co-Founder at RunLLM, joins host Lukas Biewald to explore innovative approaches to evaluating LLMs.They discuss the concept of vi…
Snowflake’s CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy on 700+ LLM enterprise use cases [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 55:42
In this episode of Gradient Dissent, Snowflake CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy joins host Lukas Biewald to explore how AI is transforming enterprise data strategies.They discuss Sridhar's journey from Google to Snowflake, diving i…
Elevating ML Infrastructure with Modal Labs CEO Erik Bernhardsson [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 49:39
In this episode of Gradient Dissent, Erik Bernhardsson, CEO & Founder of Modal Labs, joins host Lukas Biewald to discuss the future of machine learning infrastructure. They explore how Modal is enhancing the developer ex…
From No-Code to AI-Powered Apps with Airtable’s Howie Liu [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 1:12:57
In this episode of Gradient Dissent, Howie Lou, CEO of Airtable, joins host Lukas Biewald to dive into Airtable's transformation from a no-code app builder to a platform capable of supporting complex AI-driven workflows.…
Reinventing AI Agents with Imbue CEO Kanjun Qiu [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 48:37
In this episode of Gradient Dissent, Kanjun Qiu, CEO and Co-founder of Imbue, joins host Lukas Biewald to discuss how AI agents are transforming code generation and software development. Discover the potential impact and…
From startup to $1.2B with Lambda’s Stephen Balaban [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 49:56
In this episode of Gradient Dissent, Stephen Balaban, CEO of Lambda Labs, joins host Lukas Biewald to discuss the journey of scaling Lambda Labs to an impressive $400M in revenue. They explore the pivotal moments that sh…