5 Ways the Criteo AI Lab is Changing Ad Tech (and How You Can Be a Part of It)

Five reasons why researchers, data scientists, or engineers who are interested in innovation in the advent of innovation should join Criteo.

The future of advertising is 1:1 personalization. And to get there, the industry needs a fundamental understanding of the relationship between a user and the products and brands they interact with.

The Criteo AI Lab comes at the perfect time. Our researchers and engineers are exploring advanced machine learning models that can create better user experiences and help advertisers form deeper connections with their customers. They’re on a mission to not just develop state-of-the-art AI, but one day use it to change the way brands advertise through the Criteo platform.

There’s a lot that the Criteo AI Lab wants to accomplish, and we have job openings for talented people who want to be a part of something big. We’re looking for individuals who are passionate about AI research and share our vision for shaping the ad tech industry and beyond.

If you’re a researcher, data scientist, or engineer interested in changing the ad tech space, here are five reasons why Criteo is where you should be.

1. Start Conversations that Shape the AI Industry

The Criteo AI Lab is front and center for conversations about advancing AI and machine learning. From academic conferences and presentations to webinars and whitepapers, we get the message out there.

Earlier this year, we partnered with WiMLDS (Women in Machine Learning & Data Science) to organize a networking event for women in tech and a discussion of how AI is transforming advertising.

Criteo’s Suju Rajan, senior vice president of research and head of the Criteo AI Lab, and Research Scientist Fengjiao Wang shared advice on scaling machine learning systems to process billions of predictions and effectively catalog data. Criteo Senior Software Engineer Diane Gasselin closed things out with tips on using machine learning insights to optimize targeting and drive customer recommendations at scale. Watch our video from the event:

You can catch up anytime on what the AI Lab is thinking about by reading the Criteo Tech Blog on Medium.

The Criteo AI Lab also supports many major events dedicated to the advancement of machine learning, both inside and outside the ad tech industry. Click here to find an upcoming event in your city.

2. Set the Standard for AI-Powered Advertising

The Criteo AI Lab is focused on more than just improving ad performance for Criteo customers. Our mission is to make the internet better.

Typical research labs are built as a stand-alone group. But the Criteo AI Lab joins our two main arms of R&D—Criteo Research and our Machine Learning Platform Engineering team—which means that our research lab has the engineering power to integrate AI research into our production systems.

The lab is backed by a $23 million (€20 million) investment over three years, proving that Criteo is serious about AI and how it can be used to improve the performance of digital advertising. We want to understand why the most effective models work, study their ability to generalize, and test their fragility. And we want to help the world understand this technology, too.

Our research benefits the end user, our clients, our publishers, and Criteo by making advertising more personalized and relevant and therefore, more impactful.

3. Foster a Community of Innovation

Making an investment in the AI community means building up that community. The Criteo AI Lab supports the broader AI industry through development and open communication.

We publish our research at major conferences, open-source software, offer public workshops, contribute to online machine learning repositories, and regularly release data sets for public use. We even hold the record for releasing the world’s largest public machine learning data set at one terabyte in size and 4 billion event lines.

Most recently, as part of our outreach program to spread industry knowledge and connect AI innovators, the Crito AI Lab hosted a community crash-course on deep learning. The workshop was given by Aurélien Géron, author of Hands-On Machine Learning with Scikit-Learn and TensorFlow. Attendees learned expert tips for using Tensorflow and had the opportunity to talk with Géron. Watch a video of the course:

4. Steer the Future of Machine Learning

Criteo was built for the open Internet and believes in the opportunity, choice, and freedom that it offers to everyone. Part of our plan to stay true to our company mission is to test the limits of machine learning and AI in the context of advertising.

The AI Lab’s numerous research publications are the windows into the minds of our researchers. Our research scientists are encouraged to publish their works at international conferences, collaborate with academic partners, file for patents, release data sets, and most importantly, play a key role in the future of machine learning.

Their research is influential. The Causal Embeddings for Recommendation paper by the AI Lab’s Stephen Bonner and Flavian Vasile received the honor of Best Paper at the RecSys 2018 conference. Their work could one day help advertisers understand if they’re actually changing the behavior of the consumers who see their ads.

5. Work with Great People

To do great work, you have to be surrounded by great people. Criteo’s workforce represents 91 nationalities and countless different career and personal backgrounds. Our recruiters are dedicated to building a diverse organization and creating a great work environment for every Criteo.

Newcomers to the Criteo AI Lab will join an international team with the brightest minds in the field. You’ll work with individuals like Patrick Gallinari, or David Lagardere, our engineering program manager who drove some of the AI Lab’s biggest projects to success after spending the first 15 years of his career in finance. Or Amélie Heliou, a lifelong learner inspired by topics ranging from bioinformatics to graph theory—a practice she’s loyal to even when she’s busy traveling.

We’re currently looking for outstanding machine learning research scientists located anywhere in the world with skills that span the full spectrum of scientific research—data gathering and cleaning, modeling, implementation, publication, and presentation. Click here to view our current job openings.

Tricia Carr

Tricia is a writer and editor obsessed with learning new things. She's written about everything from retail trends and marketing technology to cocktails and vegan food. When she's not creating content, she's probably getting lost in New York or cooking breakfast food.

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