Speakers

I’ve been programming since forever, writing video games and software in Assembly and C/C++, but my first career was actually in Physics rather than Computer Science.

After graduating from Ecole Polytechnique (Paris, France), I worked on laser-plasma interactions at the BELLA Center of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley, CA). Got accepted for a Ph.D. at MIT (Cambridge, MA) in the USA but ended up doing my Ph.D. in Statistical/Quantum physics at Sorbonne University and ESPCI (Paris, France), working on superconducting materials for the DGA(French DARPA) and Thales. After my PhD, I needed a change from the long time scale of experiments in physics and ended up totally changing direction. I joined an IP Law firm, Cabinet Plasseraud (Paris, France), got a law degree from Pantheon Sorbonne University and worked as a Patent Attorney for 5 years, assisting a portfolio of startups and big companies to build and defend their Intellectual Property assets.

In 2015, I was consulting for many Deep-Learning/AI/ML startups and they made me discover the maths behind the new ML/AI revolution. I realised that most of these methods, equations and tools were just re-branded statistical physics approaches which fueled my interest for Machine Learning and Deep Learning. I started my online education in AI/ML reading books and following online courses. About year later, one of my friend asked me if I wanted to start something crazy ambitious with Hugging Face, and there I was, doing science and coding again and having a lot of fun!