In the latest development, Amit Singhal, former Senior Vice President of Search at Google has joined Uber. From now on, he will be heading the Maps and Marketplace departments and also advise CEO Travis Kalanick and Uber VP of Engineering and Otto co-founder Anthony Levandowski as well on self-driving technology.
At Google, Singhal helped the company in building contextual awareness into query recognition.
Amit Singhal, Uber SVP of Engineering, said:
This company is not only doing things that are amazing, this company also has some of the toughest computer science challenges that I have seen in my career of 25 years. Those computer science challenges for a computer science geek are just intriguing – you give a geek a puzzle, they can’t drop it; they need to solve the puzzle. That’s how it felt to me.
At Uber, this team is actually hiding so much deep science behind a very simple interface of pushing a button and having a car show up. The science that goes on behind that is equally as complex as what we had to do at Google. My expertise is taking deep science, building amazing engineering to implement that science, and in the process building great teams so that from a user’s perspective, the complexity is hidden, and their lives are improved in one way or another.
The challenge is deeply technical, deeply scientific and we will have to do engineering work that has never been done before, combined with science that has not been built yet. All of that combines with the fact that my parents are in their mid- to late-70s, and their mobility is going down – I don’t want them to lose their mobility. This is real, it impacts real lives, which makes it so much more important that we all get together to solve this problem for the world.