Our monthly after-work / happy-hour on October 1st at the Hotel Melia Place Vendome.

'Youthquake: how millennials are transforming society, politics, business and education'

Alumni and friends from all over the world came together in Paris from Friday, June 21^st to Sunday, June 23^rd for a weekend of inspiring talks, networking events and exciting time together.

About the theme:

The past couple of years have been years of transformational change in Society, in Politics, in Business & in Education across the globe and particularly in Europe. In politics, millennials bring new perspectives, concerns and broadly propagate information that contributes to redefine democracy and its institutions. In business, corporations are looking to engage millennials both as consumers and as a workforce. In entrepreneurship, millennials are founding unicorns with a disruptive mentality and are showing their emerging economic influence. In the social domain, millennials are deepening their focus on social, environmental and equality issues.

We believe this transformation will have profound consequences in the way we live and apprehend the world in the years to come. The Stanford Club of France is looking at helping us better understand this phenomenon, its consequences and its future during our Stanford International Weekend.

For more info on Speakers, Program, and Sponsors, you can see the original Stanford International Weekend 2019 page from our site.

On May 23 the Stanford Club of France was invited by Criteo for an evening of talks about Machine learning, followed by a tour of the Criteo AI Lab and a cocktail on the Criteo panoramic rooftop terrace.

About Criteo:
In 2005, Criteo has developed into a $2.5B global business by competing against companies such as Google, Facebook, or Amazon. The “secret sauce” of Criteo is its Engine, an application of various machine learning techniques that have been carefully optimized over time. Last year, they opened their AI Lab, which currently comprises over 80 world-class researchers and engineers.

Agenda:

In this presentation, we discussed what has prompted the need for this considerable investment in machine learning, as well as some of Criteos success stories and pitfalls. We argue that the state of the art of machine learning, as reflected in our experience, may have profound implications on the dynamics of whole industries. The investments required risk dividing players into “haves” and “have-nots”, something that may disrupt whole industries in the coming years and decades.

• Intro and overview of machine learning at Criteo (Dan Teodosiu)
• The difference between theory and practice: a brief history of the Engine (Romain Lerallut)
• State of the art in machine learning and what’s next (Flavian Vasile)
• Q&A (all)

Dan Teodosiu - Chief Technology Officer

Dan has extensive leadership experience in both startups and large companies, as well as an entrepreneur in Silicon Valley, Seattle, and Europe. He’s passionate about using technology to solve challenging business problems, building world-class engineering and research teams, and creating a strong, empowerment-based engineering culture. Dan joined Criteo in 2013 and leads all engineering, research and production. He has successfully scaled Criteo’s world class R&D team to over 600 engineers, enabling the company’s successful IPO in 2013 and setting the stage for long-term growth. Prior to Criteo, he worked at Google, Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard, and co-founded two companies in the Bay Area, one of which was acquired by Microsoft. Dan holds an MS (’96) and PhD (’00) in Computer Science from Stanford University, and is an inventor on over 50 patents.

 Romain Lerallut - Engineering Director

Romain Lerallut leads the Engineering branch of the Criteo AI Lab that is developing the Machine Learning platform supporting all Research and Product uses of AI at Criteo. Before the launch of the Lab in 2018, he spent 6 years as a manager in the Engine department, in charge of building large-scale machine learning algorithms to solve actual problems such as product recommendation or graphical layout optimization. Before joining Criteo, he was teaching computers how to read cursive handwriting at A2iA, a world-leading company in this field. Romain holds an engineering degree from Ecole des Ponts-Paristech and a PhD in Computer Science from Ecoles des Mines-Paristech.

Flavian Vasile - Research Lead

Flavian Vasile is a Research Lead in the Criteo AI Lab, where he works on the development of Deep Learning-based Recommendation Systems. Before joining Criteo, he worked as a Senior Researcher in the Twitter Advertising Science team; before that, in the Yahoo! Research Lab where he mostly focused on Content Understanding problems. His current research interests include Deep Sequential Models for Recommendation and understanding Recommendation as a decision-making system with reward uncertainty. Among his recent research publications, the work on Causal Embeddings for Recommendation received the best paper award at RecSys 2018 and he is the co-organizer of the Workshop on Offline Evaluation for Recommender Systems. Flavian holds an MSc degree in Machine Learning from Iowa State University.

There is no shortage of headlines about how to live healthier and longer, and myriad products and programs promise to give one extra years of life. Professor Rehkopf discussed what laboratory and epidemiological studies over the past decade have taught us about what is most likely to be true and what isn’t, focusing on what he consider to be the five most surprising and important recent discoveries.

For more details, see 19_Rehkopf_StanfordFrance_longevity

Professor David Rehkopf

ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF MEDICINE (PRIMARY CARE AND POPULATION HEALTH) AND, BY COURTESY, OF HEALTH RESEARCH AND POLICY (EPIDEMIOLOGY)

Professor Rehkopf's work focuses on the way in which social and economic factors impact health and mortality across the lifespan, with particular attention to the impact of work and earnings on cardiovascular biomarkers and obesity. He completed his dissertation at the Harvard School of Public Health in March of 2006 in the Department of Society, Human Development and Health. His dissertation, entitled “The non-linear impacts of income on mortality, biomarkers and growth,” documents the ways in which higher income has different returns to health and human development depending on a household's position in the income distribution.

On Tuesday, January 29th, we had our annual meeting (the "Assemblée Générale") at the Hotel de l'Industrie.

We had a great turnout with over sixty attendees, including many Stanford in Paris students, staff, and professor in residence David Rehkopf.

The actions and financial results of the club for 2018 were unanimously approved by the members present. The Stanford International Weekend event was discussed and fully approved. Part of the Board of Directors was renewed.

For more details, see the event agenda or have a look at the Major Events of 2018 at Stanford.