Route Planning with Parker Woodward

Ever wondered how route planning apps, well, plan routes? In this episode, we navigate through this fascinating topic, a field as data-driven and systemic as it is magical and compelling.

Joining us is Parker Woodward, Route Expert and Marketing Director for Route4Me. We discuss how route planning works, the intricacies behind it, and how services like Route4Me perform complex balancing acts between machine learning and user-generated feedback.

This episode touches on the following key topics and ideas:

00:00:23 Introducing Parker

00:01:54 Becoming a Route Expert

00:04:22 Getting started through smaller startups

00:12:41 Leveraging technology for the greater good

00:14:36 The magic of route planning

00:23:30 Homomorphism and satisfiability

00:31:18 Geocoding

00:33:06 User-generated feedback

00:37:08 Importance of statistics knowledge

00:39:34 The degree of automation in route planning

00:42:54 Inverse decision-making

00:48:47 Operations Research

00:53:42 Dwarf Fortress

00:56:40 US vs European routes

00:57:51 What Route4Me does

01:05:38 Working at Route4Me

01:10:26 Route4Me API

Resources mentioned in this episode:

Tools

Route4Me https://route4me.com
Route4Me API https://route4me.io
Waze https://www.waze.com
Google Maps https://www.google.com/maps
OpenStreetMap https://www.openstreetmap.org
MapQuest https://www.mapquest.com
DeepMind https://deepmind.com

Books

Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari

Games

Dwarf Fortress http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/

Links

Waymo https://waymo.com/
Upwork https://www.upwork.com/

Reach out to Parker via email: parker@routeforme.com

Catch Parker on LinkedIn

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