Speaking @ Locate: Nicolás García Belmonte
Head of Visualization at Uber
By: Joe Gomez
Locate | Pier 27, San Francisco, CA | May 30–31, 2018
At Locate, our two-day user conference, we’re exploring how big data visualization generates valuable insights for companies. Nicolás García Belmonte, Head of Visualization at Uber, will be joining us to talk about how his team is creating new, visual tools to help Uber understand its massive stream of real-time location data.
Every day, Uber manages billions of GPS locations. Every minute, our platform handles millions of mobile events. Every time we don’t use technology to analyze and interpret this information is an opportunity missed to better understand our business. -Nicolás García Belmonte
Nicolas has been telling stories with data for a long time. Before joining Uber, he headed the interactive.twitter.com effort, building visual narratives around live events. You may have seen his work in the New York Times, at Cannes, and during Twitter’s IPO. You’ll get the chance to see him in person as a featured speaker at Locate.
We recently picked Nicolas’s brain about the state of big data at Uber. Here’s what he had to say:
What is deck.gl? Why did you build it?
The many GPS points we process every day serve needs across the company. We need this data to be web-based, real-time, and shareable so other teams at Uber can use it. To meet all these needs, we developed deck.gl. For example, if we have a problem in our platform, we can explore historical geolocation data to diagnose it. If there’s an accident on the road, we can analyze GPS traces for a given trip to get the full context. If there are pain points around pickup locations in a city, we can communicate plans to city authorities with interactive visualizations.
Deck.gl is based on the latest WebGL technologies including Mapbox GL, what are the advantages?
You get high-performance rendering of large datasets (millions of points or vertices), including features like on-the-fly aggregation and visual exploration. It allows high-precision numerical computations on the GPU, thanks to our custom fp64 math library. It also uses the latest coding standards, including ES2016, and a rich ecosystem of libraries and settings that enable easy debugging and profiling of WebGL applications.
What are you personally most excited about exploring at Locate?
I’m excited to see creative uses of visualization and web technology, especially for geospatial analysis. I’m also interested in augmented reality, mixed reality, and other mediums for visualizing and analyzing location data in new ways.
Locate’s talks, demos, and code labs will explore the intersection of location and big data, as well as other themes in the mapping space. Stay tuned as we announce more speakers in the coming weeks. Register for early bird tickets to save your spot.
