Interview with Isaac Brodsky, Principal Engineer at Foursquare

For modern businesses, improving customer experiences is one of the major goals. Use of AI and ML in the exploration of customer behavior on the basis of location and knowledge of how people interact. Foursquare understands movement and places, which helps it learn what people want to experience, buy, and where they want to go. Analytics Insight has engaged in an exclusive interview with Isaac Brodsky, Principal Engineer at Foursquare

1. Kindly brief us about the company, its specialization, and the services that your company offers.

Foursquare understands movement and places, which helps us learn what people want to experience, buy, and where they want to go. As a leader in the geo-location space, our tech stack uses the power of location and knowledge of how people interact with it to improve customer experiences and drive better business outcomes.

Foursquare provides tools like Places API, and Pilgrim SDK as well as Unfolded and Hex Tiles, both of which are part of the larger Unfolded Studio and SDKs family. I came to Foursquare in 2021 when it acquired Unfolded, which I co-founded back in 2019. I came at the right time, too. With the economy coming out of the pandemic, consumer behaviors have changed dramatically. Companies need Foursquare to help them figure out what those changes were and how they need to adjust to them.

2. Tell us how your company is contributing to the IoT/AI/Big Data Analytics/Robotics/Self-Driving Vehicles/Cloud Computing industry of the nation and how the company is benefiting the clients.

We are the largest independent location technology company and location data is our only business. We base our work on reliable data, from 500 million devices, 13 billion verified place visits and over 100 million distinct places.

Two tools that are prime examples of how we are contributing to the machine learning and artificial intelligence spaces are Hex Tiles, a next-generation tiling system that can have large-scale spatial data prepped and ready for analytics in minutes, and Pilgrim SDK, which creates timely, context-driven app experiences that drive engagement and revenue.

Our value is more than data collection, however, and more in making sense of all of it. For instance, Pilgrim Snap-to-Place, a core part of Pilgrim SDK's visit detection technology, uses machine learning to passively identify when someone has visited a place, allowing developers to pinpoint when a user has visited a specific venue. For instance, in a large shopping mall, this technology can be used to identify which individual store was visited. Or, on a busy main street, to differentiate whether someone stopped at a stoplight outside of the store, or physically went inside. These differences are critical for business decision-makers.

Leading brands including Apple, AirBnB, Twitter, Uber, Snapchat, and Coca-Cola use our data and technology to make decisions on everything from store locations and product offerings to employee schedules and marketing spending.

3. What is the reason that organizations are using IoT/analytics/big data/AI/ML/Big Data Analytics?

Data analytics, when used and interpreted correctly, has an enormous return on investment. It is a powerful tool for strategic business decision-making. People live and work in the physical world, and companies need to understand how. For example, retail chains might need to understand how COVID-19 related lockdowns affected traffic patterns to their physical locations in cities with the tightest restrictions. To do this, they need to present massive amounts of data simply enough that a non-data scientist can understand. This data is used for everything from site selection to competitive analysis. Tools like Hex Tiles and our Unfolded Studio make that possible. Unfolded is a geospatial visualization and analytics platform built on leading open source technologies, and Hex Tiles is a tool used within the Unfolded platform used for performing large-scale geospatial data visualization and analytics. Both help data scientists extract tangible insights that business decision-makers can act on.

4. How does your company's rich expertise help uncover patterns with powerful analytics and machine learning?

At Foursquare, every one of our products helps customers uncover patterns using our powerful analytics capabilities. I have spent my entire career working with geospatial data. First at Uber, then Unfolded and now at Foursquare, deriving powerful insights that enable data analysts to work more efficiently has been a priority.

5. Please brief us about the products/services/solutions you provide to your customers and how do they get value out of it

Foursquare has been a location data company since its inception. That journey has included the rollout of improved versions of our API and SDK, continued work on our first and third party data panels, the development of new tools for marketers, data scientists, and developers, the pioneering of the use of location data for business intelligence, acquisitions and mergers, and much more.

Our customers vary across industries, but they all have one thing in common: they are data-driven organizations. Foursquare provides accurate location intelligence grounded in first party data and trusted tools such as SDKs, APIs, and dashboards for marketers, data scientists, data analysts, and program managers alike.

6. Could you highlight your company's recent innovations in the AI/ML/Analytics space?

Most recently, we launched Hex Tiles. I have been working on this project since we started Unfolded and am very proud and excited to see it in the marketplace for our customers to use.

In short, Hex Tiles is a next-generation location data system that gives data scientists the ability to easily unify diverse spatial datasets, conduct on-the-fly analytics, and quickly visualize and explore big data on a planetary scale. Hex Tiles can do it all in a matter of minutes, within the browser through Foursquare's Unfolded Platform. Hex Tiles can transfer large-scale geospatial data over the web in a tiled, tabular, gridded format, meaning only the data needed is brought to the browser, the right data needed for analysis can be brought in, and the data is already in the right form for geospatial analytics. Best of all, anyone can visualize and explore planetary-scale datasets fluidly and in crisp detail without coding. By using Hex Tiles, you can process geospatial data in parallel, giving it the ability to support visualization and fluid exploration of data at interactive speeds. You can easily work with any area of interest on the map without concerns about the size of your data.

7. Where are we going from here?

Many thought that COVID would lessen the need for location data, given restrictions and lockdowns. Instead, it did the opposite. People looked to location data to help them understand COVID's impact – whether through public dashboards that showed the number of cases in their local area or businesses trying to understand changes in foot traffic.  And now we're all yearning for those real-world experiences again. Moreover, we're yearning for new experiences, and, now that we're going out again, our lives will have whole new patterns.

As companies uncover these new patterns, our location technology software offerings will enable them to quickly and nimbly act on their own data. Foursquare's job, then, is to understand how people's behaviors are changing. We want to be the first place businesses think of when they need more data, and when they need the tools to understand what the data is telling them. Our products moving forward will solve that huge question hanging over nearly every company.

In my day-to-day work, this translates to a continued focus on our next-generation tiling system, Hex Tiles. Hex Tiles will be integral as companies and organizations continue trying to understand how people live and work in the world now. We truly believe that this will revolutionize the lives of data scientists around the world. What used to take days can now take minutes with Hex Tiles, and the opportunities for robust analysis are endless. We can't wait to see what our customers can create with Hex Tiles as a resource at their fingertips.