Lessons from Applied AI: Tesla, Waymo, and Beyond - Aishwarya Jadhav

In this episode, we talked with Aishwarya Jadhav, a machine learning engineer whose career has spanned Morgan Stanley, Tesla, and now Waymo. Aishwarya shares her journey from big data in finance to applied AI in self-driving, gesture understanding, and computer vision. She discusses building an AI guide dog for the visually impaired, contributing to malaria mapping in Africa, and the challenges of deploying safe autonomous systems. We also explore the intersection of computer vision, NLP, and LLMs, and what it takes to break into the self-driving AI industry.TIMECODES00:51 Aishwarya’s career journey from finance to self-driving AI05:45 Building AI guide dog for the visually impaired12:03 Exploring LiDAR, radar, and Tesla’s camera-based approach16:24 Trust, regulation, and challenges in self-driving adoption19:39 Waymo, ride-hailing, and gesture recognition for traffic control24:18 Malaria mapping in Africa and AI for social good29:40 Deployment, safety, and testing in self-driving systems37:00 Transition from NLP to computer vision and deep learning43:37 Reinforcement learning, robotics, and self-driving constraints51:28 Testing processes, evaluations, and staged rollouts for autonomous driving52:53 Can multimodal LLMs be applied to self-driving?55:33 How to get started in self-driving AI careersConnect with Aishwarya- Linkedin - https://www.linkedin.com/in/aishwaryajadhav8/Connect with DataTalks.Club:- Join the community - https://datatalks.club/slack.html- Subscribe to our Google calendar to have all our events in your calendar - https://calendar.google.com/calendar/r?cid=ZjhxaWRqbnEwamhzY3A4ODA5azFlZ2hzNjBAZ3JvdXAuY2FsZW5kYXIuZ29vZ2xlLmNvbQ- Check other upcoming events - https://lu.ma/dtc-events- GitHub: https://github.com/DataTalksClub- LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/company/datatalks-club/ - Twitter - https://twitter.com/DataTalksClub - Website - https://datatalks.club/