DeepMap, Inc

During Summer 2020, I interned at a self-driving car company called DeepMap, which provides high definition mapping and localization solutions for autonomous vehicles. In layman’s terms, the company develops software that helps autonomous vehicles know where exactly they are in the road and what exists after that left turn. (There is a lot more under the hood, but that’s the basic idea).

My project as a software engineer intern was to build a single page web app that helps DeepMap employees visualize different chunks of the road that the self-driving car’s sensors capture. These chunks are also called review tasks because they have to be manually reviewed by a DeepMap employee for any faults in the object detection system or other areas. The tool that I created allows the user to filter through the different review tasks that are present based on attributes such as location and type. I used Leaflet for the spatial view. The web tool also provides a Gantt view of the review tasks so that they can be planned easier. Some review tasks can take months, so this was a much-needed product. I used React to build this web application. Due to the huge amounts of data that is collected by the autonomous vehicles, I used Protocol Buffers to keep the data size small.

Overall, I had a lot of fun during this internship. I was given the opportunity to contribute to one of humanity’s most trasnformative technologies to date, which I will never forget. I hope to work on many more challenging and interesting problems in the future.