I am always eager to bring together the innovation I can offer with the know-how of my clients and the people I have the privilege to work with. For example, many of my projects are the result of close collaboration with my friend and business mentor Laurent Pantanacce. We've been kicking around ideas together since 2016: he convinced Oscaro.com to fund my Ph.D. and then I worked with him on a number of projects since then, benefiting from his experience alongside him. Along the way, we have developed a unique methodology in artificial intelligence that we call heedgi.
This page illustrates our philosophy at work. The story of each project is told in a way that highlights the results, combining the scientific thinking and strategic mindset that underpin these successes. From the ambitious ideas to the practical challenges of implementation, let's try to demonstrate our commitment to creating a true enterprise AI experience.
Open Source, Open Data, Open Weights
Open Source has proven that removing barriers to learning, using, sharing, and improving software yield massive benefits for everyone. By applying these same principles to artificial intelligence—ensuring autonomy, transparency, frictionless reuse, and collaborative improvement—we can extend these gains to developers, deployers, and users alike.
probabl.ai was born at the heart of French scientific excellence at INRIA and builds on the legacy of the iconic scikit-learn project. Our mission: to set the highest industry standards for Open Source in Data Science. Through our commercial activities in certifications, products and consulting, we accelerate the diffusion of our innovations to the real economy.
🔥 Own your Data Science
At the end of November 2024, I proudly joined a company whose members I’ve admired for over 15 years—ever since the day I wrote the words import sklearn
which shaped the trajectory of my career in Data Science. My role is twofold: to develop my team of Data Science consultants and to work with paying users and clients, deepening our understanding of industrial needs while championing our Open Source cause.
Dr. Florent Costantini, ophthalmologist and founder of glasspop, 2024
heedgi (Laurent Pantanacce and Warith Harchaoui)
glasspop has developed the first product that allows patients to test their own vision. Prescribing glasses requires skill, but manufacturing them on a large scale costs only one dollar, which calls for a disruption!
👓 Ophthalmology
Laurent Pantanacce and I applied our heedgi methodology, to assist glasspop in tackling their ambitious challenge. Our approach reduced the number of optical tests required per patient by integrating proprietary artificial intelligence that optimizes patients' visual comfort.
This work was presented at two specialized ophthalmology conferences:
Dr. Alexandre Larmagnac, head of pre-engineering at Volpi Group, 2023
heedgi (Laurent Pantanacce and Warith Harchaoui)
Volpi helps patients by improving the manufacturers instruments of in vitro diagnostics (IVD) & life sciences.
🩸 In vitro diagnostics (IVD) & life sciences
What are the potential goals and targets for Volpi with AI?
‣ Reduce costs thanks to AI in software within the hardware
‣ Amplify medical annotation efforts with a human-in-the-loop approach
‣ Guide and advise from R&D to production, avoiding costly pitfalls
Through the heedgi methodology , we focused our attention on a clinical problem and the best way to measure success: the unit of value and KPI for leading, choosing and building through our tailor-made AI for Volpi.
Acculturation, advanced technical consulting and clinical understanding were the key elements of the tailor-made program we conducted for Volpi. Our goal was to prepare Volpi for an AI fast track to customer success. The fact that our heedgi methodology contributes to a solid AI foundation at Volpi from management to scientists, technicians and salespeople, is a source of satisfaction.
Annual performance review from Jellysmack, 2022
Jellysmack helps video creators from content production and editing to social media promotion.
🛜 Promoting Video Creators on the Internet
I asked my manager, Nicolas Renard, if I could quote this sentence 👆, and he responded by saying he agrees. Thank you, Nicolas, for being not only a super manager but also for your incredible and irreplaceable replacement for the MBA course at Rennes School of Business! 🙏🙏🙏
At Jellysmack, the team brings best efforts to help the web video creation space with cool projects in computer vision and natural language processing at the service of creators around the world.
The mission is twofold :
‣ igniting innovation through applied research prototypes
‣ offering research support to other artificial intelligence/machine learning teams by providing fresh, bibliographic, and pragmatic insights
We aim at inventing and improving the secret sauces, diligently crafting code deliverables, conducting scientific and technology watch, and engaging in internal and external talks.
Proudest achievement?
The video representation project, a combination of multiple kernel learning and Nyström approximation.
We meticulously gathered and harmonized the finest video representations available from research. With the invaluable insights from our media experts, we did not only infer our own combined similarity but also engineered fixed-sized vector representations for efficient grouping, retrieval, and success prediction estimation.
Additionally, we believe we revolutionize video editing leveraging the work of our hundreds of professional editors, optimizing rush-to-edit and short conversion processes for platforms like YouTube, Facebook, Instagram and TikTok. By analyzing multiple high-level signals and devising various splitting methods, we provide suggestions to editors, ensuring a seamless and creative editing experience minimizing the time spent on tedious non-artistic tasks.
Scientifically, it’s intellectually challenging to deal with videos because this medium is multimodal: image, sound, speech, music and motion. In terms of business, these fields is much rewarding when considering the success of videos and reduced time spent to build which clearly define our pragmatic performance indicators.
Student, 2022
heedgi (Laurent Pantanacce and Warith Harchaoui)
Laurent Pantanacce and I carefully have delivered a torrefied 16-hour Executive MBA course at Rennes School of Business, titled “Artificial Intelligence for Business” since 2021.
🧑🏫 Executive MBA
This course bridges the chasm between AI academia experts and corporate managers. For managers, CxOs, and tech-savvy AI enthusiasts, the course is designed as a beacon guiding professionals through the labyrinth of AI fundamentals, project management, and real-world application avoiding pitfalls in a sustainable business.
With over 200 slides of constantly updated and tested material, we distill refined knowledge from case studies, practical examples and interactive sessions. The program, which has been rolled out more than three times, is a tapestry weaving together AI basics, challenges, cutting-edge technologies and effective strategies, all aimed at empowering participants to conduct AI projects with confidence and even subtlety for the benefit of customers and sustainable businesses.
With a Ph.D. in applied mathematics and a seasoned tech entrepreneur as instructors, the course is more than a leap of faith; it's a leap to AI mastery and business success.
Nathalie Birocheau, founder of Ircam Amplify, 2022
Warith Harchaoui
Ircam Amplify's mission is to make the very best in audio research and musical creation from IRCAM labs available to benefit markets with products.
🎶 Helping artists monetizing their content
The aim of Ircam Amplify is to blend technology, mathematics and music, creating harmonious solutions that resonate with science and music while striking a chord in the marketplace.
In this mission, Ircam Amplify and I looked at maximizing profits on Spotify from our music catalogs.
This involved crafting innovative algorithms to accurately analyze, encode and price to promote old and new tracks.
We leveraged the dynamics of data, guiding music lovers on a personalized journey of discovery, while taking into account the latest trends and listener success histories.
By intelligently grouping tracks and encoding them adaptively, and by leveraging Ircam's extensive research capital, we enable artificial intelligence systems to appreciate music.
We have also experimented with connecting the news feed to improve suggestions.
Erwann Le Pennec, Professor at École Polytechnique and Ph.D. jury referee, 2020
Warith Harchaoui
MAP5 is the Applied Math lab of Université de Paris that hosts Warith Harchaoui studying Generative and Discriminative AI for 4 wonderful years.
🎓 Math Lab
During four life-changing years at MAP5 (2016-2020) within Université de Paris's applied math lab, under the guidance of my supervisors Charles Bouveyron,
we delved into the enthralling realm of Generative and Discriminative AI.
Engaging deeply with neural networks and deep learning, we repurposed these potent tools. Indeed our work included pioneering clustering techniques with GANs, adept at organizing vast datasets, such as extensive photo collections.
We also explored unsupervised feature importance, revealing distinctive dataset attributes without labels.
It was a happy coincidence that I met Dr. Élodie Germani during an internship I was lucky enough to supervise with Dr. Alkéos Michaïl. Élodie is now a researcher specialising in Artificial Intelligence for Medical Imaging.
Additionally, my academic and corporate work focused on methods to assess the reliability of automated decisions, providing a crucial statistical approach for applications requiring human oversight.
This exploration merged mathematics from optimal transport and neural networks, helping us reevaluate data representation.
Thanks to the warmth of MAP5 and the persistence of Oscaro, our journey modestly contributed to a field that we find immense and deeply meaningful.
Pierre-Noël Luiggi, founder of Oscaro.com, 2020
Warith Harchaoui
Oscaro.com is a European leader in e-commerce for car parts.
🚘 E-commerce for car parts
At Oscaro.com, we participated in innovative initiatives as R&D Data Scientists, seamlessly blending deep learning and artificial intelligence to craft robust solutions. Our work was pivotal in implementing cutting-edge credit card fraud detection mechanisms, significantly mitigating risks and safeguarding transactions. Concurrently, we delved into demand forecasting, utilizing deep learning to accurately predict and adeptly respond to market dynamics, thereby driving efficiency and customer satisfaction.
Credit card fraud detection was a good example of asking ourselves the right questions: at the time, companies used to count errors, our approach consisted in counting the company's money loss. All systems in AI and beyond make mistakes: our job is to handle them in the most meaningful way. Thinking this way completely modifies the way you measure algorithm performances and also the way algorithms are rewarded and thus trained. It's also beneficial for management as the whole chain of command, even without AI knowledge, now understands what is optimized: the company's money. It turns out this approach made our career much easier with companies and clients.
Our role also encompassed AI technology watch, where we diligently monitored and analyzed emerging trends, research, and companies in the AI sphere, ensuring Oscaro.com stayed ahead in the competitive landscape. This commitment to excellence was further underscored by our pursuit of a Ph.D., generously funded from September 2016 to October 2020. Balancing from academic to work environments enriched our AI points of view, both feeding the common intellectual thirst.
Within the Oscaro.com group, there was the xBrain start-up, pioneering in chatbots and I had the pleasure of supervising an internship for Dr. Maxime Haddouche, who is now a researcher in Machine Learning and numerical optimisation.