Nov 28, 2022Building a recommendation engine from scratchThis article a step-by-step guide to help you build a recommendation engine from scratch, with a few neat tricks that I learned during my six years at Criteo. I assume that you have data and would like to see results quickly. In particular, I assume that you have: A catalog…Recommendations5 min readRecommendations5 min read
Sep 8, 2022Where self-driving is headedBack in 2007, I was a core member of the MIT DARPA Urban Challenge team. We built one of the first self-driving cars to operate in urban environments. This was the pre-deep-learning era. It was fun, but we knew the road was going to be long. Fifteen years later, the…Self Driving Cars4 min readSelf Driving Cars4 min read
Published inCriteo R&D Blog·Jan 6, 2022Lightweight Representation Learning For Efficient And Scalable RecommendationIn 2019, we set up a team to revamp the machine learning models behind our recommendation engine at Criteo. The existing engine had been optimized for years. It was based on large-scale logistic regression and collaborative filtering (RecSys’15 paper). The time had come for a makeover. We tried several approaches…Criteo6 min readCriteo6 min read
Dec 8, 2021The high road of performance reviews“People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” Performance review is a singular moment in the year. Things are said that sometimes become defining moments in your career, in a positive or negative way. …Management5 min readManagement5 min read
Dec 8, 2021How to write a good self-reviewA few weeks ago, I shared a few tips with my team on how to write a self-review effectively in the context of the yearly performance review. Then I thought, if I am going to share this with my team, why not share it with the world? :) Before we…Leadership2 min readLeadership2 min read
Nov 8, 2021How to spot a great research scientist?The CTO of a tech company recently asked me how I spot great research scientists. He was probably expecting answers along the lines of a great publication track record, an amazing Kaggle rank or a fantastic multi-star github repository. My answer probably baffled him. “There are three traits that I…3 min read3 min read
Sep 13, 2021Why hackathons fail and what you can do about itA hackathon is a great opportunity to boost innovation in a company. It is usually a fun time of the year that boosts team morale and strengthens collaboration across the company. Unfortunately, winning ideas often don’t make it to production. The team is great, the idea is great, the proof-of-concept…Hackathons4 min readHackathons4 min read
Published inCriteo R&D Blog·Aug 26, 2020The Trade-Offs of Large-Scale Machine Learning: the price of timeWhat defines large-scale machine learning? This seemingly innocent question is often answered with petabytes of data and hundreds of GPUs. It turns out that large-scale machine learning does not have much to do with all of that. In 2013, Léon Bottou gave a class on the topic at Institut Poincaré…Machine Learning7 min readMachine Learning7 min read
Published inCriteo R&D Blog·Jan 16, 2020Your first 90 days as a tech leadSo you’re becoming a tech lead. You have the support of your manager and your team. You will be getting formal training soon and your manager will be coaching you. This is all nice and great, but… what could help you become a great tech lead now? This post aims…Management13 min readManagement13 min read
Published inCriteo R&D Blog·Jun 6, 2019Making your company machine learning-centricApparently, software is eating the world and AI is eating software. As more and more companies are turning to machine learning (ML) to disrupt their businesses, it occurred to me that a split was appearing between companies that are truly ML-centric and companies that aren’t. What defines an ML-centric company…Machine Learning14 min readMachine Learning14 min read
