“Telematics”, a cross between the words telecommunications and informatics, was coined in the late 1970s to refer to the use of communication technologies in facilitating exchange of information. In the modern day, such technologies may include cloud platforms, mobile networks, and wireless transmissions (e.g., Bluetooth). Although the initial intention is for a more general scope, telematics is now specifically used to refer to vehicle telematics where details of vehicle movements are tracked for use cases such as driving safety, driver profiling, fleet optimisation, and productivity improvements.

We’ve previously published this article to share how Grab uses telematics to improve driver safety. In this blog post, we dive deeper into how telematics technology is used at Grab to encourage safer driving for our driver and delivery partners.

Analysts need to analyse and simulate a rule on historical data to check the performance and accuracy of the rule. Backtesting enables analysts to run simulations of the rules and manage the results from the rule engine UI.

In the real world, after a passenger places a GrabFood order from the Grab App, the merchant-partner will prepare the order. A driver-partner will then collect the food and deliver it to the passenger. Have you ever wondered what happens in the backend system? The Grab Order Platform is a distributed system that processes millions of GrabFood or GrabMart orders every day. This post aims to share the journey of how we designed the database solution that powers the order platform.

Knowledge management is often one of the biggest challenges most companies face internally. Teams spend several working hours trying to either inefficiently look for information or constantly asking colleagues about information already documented somewhere. A lot of time is spent on the internal employee communication channels (in our case, Slack) simply trying to figure out answers to repetitive questions. On our journey to automate the responses to these repetitive questions, we needed first to figure out exactly how much time and effort is spent by on-call engineers answering such repetitive questions.

We soon identified that many of the internal engineering tools’ on-call activities involve answering users’ (internal users) questions on various Slack channels. Many of these questions have already been asked or documented on the wiki. These inquiries hinder on-call engineers’ productivity and affect their ability to focus on operational tasks. Once we figured out that on-call employees spend a lot of time answering Slack queries, we decided on a journey to determine the top questions.

We considered smaller groups of teams for this study and found out that:

• The topmost user queries are “How do I do ABC?” or “Is XYZ broken?”.
• The second most commonly asked questions revolve around access requests, approvals, or other permissions. The answer to such questions is often URLs to existing documentation.

These findings informed us that we didn’t just need an artificial intelligence (AI) based autoresponder to repetitive questions. We must, in fact, also leverage these channels’ chat histories to identify patterns.

Detecting fraud schemes used to require investigations using large amounts and varying types of data that come from many different anti-fraud systems. Investigators then need to combine the different types of data and use statistical methods to uncover suspicious claims, which is time consuming and inefficient in most cases.

We are always looking for ways to improve fraud investigation methods and stay one step ahead of our ever-growing fraudsters. In the introductory blog of this series, we’ve mentioned experimenting with a set of Graph Network technologies, including Graph Visualisation.

In this post, we will introduce our Graph Visualisation Platform and briefly illustrate how it makes fraud investigations easier and more effective.

Facial recognition technology is one of the many modern technologies that previously only appeared in science fiction movies. The roots of this technology can be traced back to the 1960s and have since grown dramatically due to the rise of deep learning techniques and accelerated digital transformation in recent years.

In this blog post, we will talk about the various applications of facial recognition technology in Grab, as well as provide details of the technical components that build up this technology.

In an introductory article, we talked about the importance of Graph Networks in fraud detection. In this article, we will be adding some further context on graphs, graph technology and some common use cases.

Connectivity is the most prominent feature of today’s networks and systems. From molecular interactions, social networks and communication systems to power grids, shopping experiences or even supply chains, networks relating to real-world systems are not random. This means that these connections are not static and can be displayed differently at different times. Simple statistical analysis is insufficient to effectively characterise, let alone forecast, networked system behaviour.

As the world becomes more interconnected and systems become more complex, it is more important to employ technologies that are built to take advantage of relationships and their dynamic properties. There is no doubt that graphs have sparked a lot of attention because they are seen as a means to get insights from related data. Graph theory-based approaches show the concepts underlying the behaviour of massively complex systems and networks.

Trustworthy experiments are key to making sound decisions, so analysts and data scientists put a lot of effort into analysing them and making business impacts. An extension of Grab’s Experimentation (GrabX) platform, Automated Experiment Analysis is one of Grab’s data products that helps automate statistical analyses of experiments. It also provides automatic experimental data pipelines and customised tests for different types of experiments.

Prior to 2021, Grab’s search architecture was designed to only support textual matching, which takes in a user query and looks for exact matches within the ecosystem through an inverted index. This legacy system meant that only textual matching results could be fetched.

In the second half of 2021, the Deliveries search team worked on improving this architecture to make it smarter, more scalable and also unlock future growth for different search use cases at Grab.

Read to find out how Grab is using the Docs-as-Code approach to improve technical documentation.

This article illustrates how the Cauldron Machine Learning (ML) Platform team uses GitLab parent-child pipelines to dynamically generate GitLab CI files to solve several limitations of GitLab for large repositories.

Grab’s real-time data platform team (Coban) covers the importance of moving data in and out of Kafka easily and how Kafka Connect helps with that.

Running batch jobs targeting a large user base is a challenge. Find out how we designed our system to tackle the challenge at scale.

Telematics is a collection of sensor data such as accelerometer data, gyroscope data, and GPS data that a driver’s mobile phone provides, and we collect, during the ride. With this information, we apply data science logic to detect traffic events such as harsh braking, acceleration, cornering, and unsafe lane changes, in order to help improve our consumers’ ride experience.

Typically, modern applications use various database engines for their service needs; within Grab, these would be MySQL, Aurora and DynamoDB. Lately, the Caspian team has observed an increasing need to consume real-time data for many service teams. These real-time changes in database records help to support online and offline business decisions for hundreds of teams.

Because of that, we have invested time into synchronising data from MySQL, Aurora and Dynamodb to the message queue, i.e. Kafka. In this blog, we share how real-time data ingestion has helped since it was launched.

Learn about the challenges of points rewarding and how GrabRewards Points are rewarded for different Grab offerings.