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Andrew Widdowson

Andrew Widdowson

Andrew Widdowson is a Senior Staff Software Engineer at Google, currently serving as a tech lead, customer advocate, and educator for Google's internal, planet-scale data analysis systems. Drawing on his 15 year run in Google's Site Reliability Engineering division, where he previously served as the "Lead for Engineering Culture", he remains an active member of the global incident response response team for Google's highest technical emergencies.
Previously, he specialized for 11 years in Google Search, for many of those years having lead Google's efforts to quantify and disincentivize robotic abuse of Search. Simultaneously, he co-lead Google's efforts to train new engineers on the scale and philosophy of Google's production environment for its first four years.
Andrew holds a BS in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University, where he is also a lifelong volunteer. Previously he was a Director on the CMU Alumni Association Board, the chair of the CMU School of Computer Science Alumni Advisory Board, the "Lieutenant Commander of Data" for the Dean's Office of the School of Computer Science.

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    Evaluation of US State-Based Policy Interventions on Social Distancing Using Aggregated Mobility Data during the COVID-19 Pandemic
    Gregory Alexander Wellenius
    Swapnil Suresh Vispute
    Valeria Espinosa
    Alex Fabrikant
    Thomas Tsai
    Jonathan Hennessy
    Andrew Dai
    Brian Patrick Williams
    Krishna Kumar Gadepalli
    Adam Boulanger
    Adam Pearce
    Chaitanya Kamath
    Arran Schlosberg
    Catherine Bendebury
    Chinmoy Mandayam
    Charlotte Stanton
    Shailesh Bavadekar
    Christopher David Pluntke
    Damien Desfontaines
    Benjamin H. Jacobson
    Zan Armstrong
    Bryant Gipson
    Royce Wilson
    Andrew Philip Widdowson
    Katherine Chou
    Andrew Nathaniel Oplinger
    Tomer Shekel
    Ashish K. Jha
    Evgeniy Gabrilovich
    Nature Communications (2021)
    Preview abstract Social distancing has emerged as the primary mitigation strategy to combat the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States. However, large-scale evaluation of the effectiveness of social distancing policies are lacking. We used aggregated mobility data to quantify the impact of social distancing policies on observed changes in mobility. Declarations of states of emergency resulted in approximately a 10% reduction in time spent outside places of residence and an increase in visits to grocery stores and pharmacies. Subsequent implementation of ≥1 social distancing policies resulted in an additional 25% reduction in mobility in the following week. The seven states that subsequently ordered residents to shelter in place on or before March 23, 2020 observed an additional 29% reduction in time spent outside the residence. Our findings suggest that state-wide mandates are highly effective in achieving the goals of social distancing to minimize the transmission of COVID-19. View details
    Accelerating SREs to On-Call and Beyond
    Andrew Widdowson
    Shylaja Nukala
    Site Reliability Engineering: How Google Runs Production Systems, O'Reilly (2016)
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