Last week, we officially launched the Criteo AI Lab. The momentous occasion was marked by a series of press and industry influencer events in Paris. On Thursday June 28, Criteo CEO JB Rudelle, and Vice President and Head of the new AI Center, Suju Rajan, hosted reporters, industry analysts, local politicians, and other dignitaries at Criteo HQ in Paris.
Top tier French journalists from LSA, Le Monde and L’AFP, industry analysts from Ovum, Forrester, IDC, PAC, iDate, GigaOM and Markess, ministers from the French government, as well as Jean-Louis Missika, the Deputy Mayor of Paris, joined us on the Criteo rooftop to hear the exciting news.
Criteo AI Lab Launch
Here are four ways the new Criteo AI Lab will help drive innovation in AI:
1. Diving into the Future of Advertising and AI
The Criteo AI Lab joins together Criteo Research with the Machine Learning Platform Engineering team, bringing together two main arms of R&D at Criteo. Typical configurations of research labs treat it as a stand-alone group whose sole mission is to publish papers, or embedded teams that help work on tactical problems.
The Criteo AI Lab stands apart as a research organization with the engineering power to develop and integrate new and state-of-the-art AI research into our production systems, as well as to push forward our common understanding of AI techniques. With an investment of $23 million (€20 million) over three years, the Criteo AI Lab walks the talk of an AI lab that is central to the company’s mission.
2. Powering Better Personalization with Advanced Machine Learning
The establishment of the Criteo AI Lab is timely as we enter a paradigm of fundamentally understanding the relationship between a user and the products and brands they interact with. The Criteo Shopper Graph works with unparalleled data collectives that see 1.4B monthly shoppers interacting with a few billion products across 18,000 partners around the world.
With recent advancement in machine learning such as deep learning architectures from other domains, the timing is right to investigate taking our predictive performance to the next level. We expect our research to improve our existing products as well as create capabilities that could lead to products we can’t even imagine yet.
3. Sharing Insights Through Transparent Reporting
Much has been said about the state of AI and in particular the potential of deep learning models. The Criteo AI Lab will take a more nuanced stance. We want to fundamentally understand why models work the way they do, understand their ability to generalize, and test their fragility to push forward our understanding of the technology.
Remaining true to our research roots, we’ll report on baselines that don’t oversell the dream. To this end, making AI interpretable will be a core mission – especially when it comes to applications in the retail space.
4. Supporting an Open AI Community
The Criteo AI Lab will continue the Criteo tradition of fostering our connections with the academic community via our Faculty Research Program, internships, and support of PhD students.
We will continue to fully participate in the vibrant AI community by publishing our research in conferences, open-sourcing software, contributing to online ML repositories, and by continuing to release datasets that can serve as benchmarks. Needless to say, we remain committed to making sure our research conforms to the highest ethical standards.
We had an amazing time at the Criteo AI Lab launch party and are excited to start on our new journey. We look forward to continuing to transform every ad into a great experience for our users.
To find out how you can join the Criteo AI Lab, check out the Criteo Careers page.
