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The Waze application receives explicit input from users referring to many issues: traffic, police traps, construction, speedcams, accidents, weather conditions, or any hazards along the way.

How does Waze validate whether these inputs are true or false?

How does Waze make the decisions that can be triggered by such input validation?

Are these validations and decisions makings performed automatically or through the intervention of a computational scientist?

Since Waze handles a streaming data processing, the validation and decision makings after a user input should be done online.

Thanks and appreciate any tips.

Wagner Vieira
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1 Answers1

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AFAIK, when a report is sent by a user in Waze (police, accident, etc) - the data is sent to the Waze servers, and then Waze performs a gradual roll-out of the report to a subset of users. Other users will either confirm the report (thumbs up) or say its not there (tapping X). The more a report is confirmed, the larger exposure it gets. This also works the other way around - if a report has already been confirmed, but then users start reporting that it's gone (for example, if an accident has been cleared out), the effect on other users is gradual until the system is confident that the report is true.

Waze's data highly depends on community input, and this has proved to be fairly reliable. Engaged users will not only send reports, but also mark reports as incorrect, and so even if incorrect data is sent to the Waze servers, the community will be quick to correct it.

Gil Moshayof
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  • Thank you for your explanation! I'm looking for a use case where the online manual intervention of a computational scientist is required to steer a streaming application, in situations that an automated steering would be complex or inefficient. But Waze would not qualify as a candidate for such use case, as Waze automatically performs a gradual roll-out of the user input to a subset of users to decide whether to validate such user input. Do you have any suggestion of a plausible use case where a computational scientist is required to perform online steering in a streaming application? – Wagner Vieira Aug 22 '18 at 13:51