I work in Merchandise Mart in Chicago home to 1871 (start up hub) and a number of large companies like Allstate, Motorola, Yelp, Braintree (paypal) and its interesting to see the shift in where people are taking job. It seems the large companies have shifted to creating new exciting teams and thus snatching up a lot of talented engineers that I have seen going to start ups over the last couple years.
I worked at HERE maps which has a large office (800+) in Chicago and worked on a computer vision system that processed 3D LiDAR and imagery. There are teams working on building crazy 3D tools and processing for building maps for autonomous vehicles. Its sad that nobody knows they are in downtown Chicago because its pretty damn interesting work.
Right, but you could have done the same work remotely (fully remote) for Mapillary.com, which is using crowdsourced outdoor images to perform photogrammetry for 3D representation through their public site [1], as well as deep machine learning to tag the images for consumption by self-driving vehicles teams. Same work as HERE, but without having to be in Chicago.
No point in me ever sticking out a Chicago winter ever again. Challenging, exciting work isn't geographically constrained there.
* I admit this moves the goal posts a bit when I said there is no exciting work going on in Chicago. I never even knew HERE was in CHI doing that sort of work. I hope they consider remote workers in the future. C'est la vie.
My beef with Mapillary is that their crowdsourced imaging license is too restrictive compared to the competing OpenStreetView project.
I think the scale of HERE is different than mapillary and the quality of data is substantially better.
We are talking data in the many many many petabytes range. 100Mil images is a tiny fraction of what HERE has. Also I am not sure if mapillary also has the high quality LiDAR data. My understanding is that they reconstruct from images, which has a much lower density and accuracy.
They also do have offices all over the world. I mentioned the Chicago office because you were saying there wasn't interesting work in Chicago.
