2017 Criteo Faculty Research Award Recipients

Criteo AI Lab announced the Criteo Faculty Research Award (CFRA) program a couple of months ago with the intention of fostering better collaboration in solving complex machine learning challenges in the space of computational advertising.

At Criteo AI Lab, we benefit from access to massive amounts of data, a continuous stream of research challenges that are directly tied to the business needs and the potential to impact the online ad experience of hundreds of millions of users all across the world. The CFRA allows us to offer the same benefits to our academic colleagues by collaborating with them in solving machine learning challenges that are of mutual interest. To quote one of our recipients, Professor Nicolo Cesa-Bianchi at the University of Milan: “My academic research thrives on collaborations with industries, which are an invaluable source of challenging problems. Faculty award programs, like the one launched by Criteo, are simple but effective funding instruments through which I can collaborate with leading companies and significantly increase the impact of my research.”

Another challenge that folks in academia face is lack of access to large-scale datasets that are drawn from an industrial setting. Criteo has always been generous in sharing its data and holds the record for publicly releasing the largest machine learning dataset to date. An added advantage that our recipients have is access & support to run their experiments at scale. To quote award recipient, Professor Thorsten Joachims at Cornell, “Such collaborations provide resources for basic research in machine learning not only through funding, but also through data from operational systems that is otherwise unavailable in academia.” In the spirit of broader sharing, the award recipients are also encouraged to publish the results of their findings, open source software developed and when feasible we will release some of the datasets used in these collaborations.

We received a number of high quality proposals for the 2017 edition of the CFRA and we are delighted to announce the following recipients.

 

Criteo AI Lab is committed to participating in and contributing back to the broader machine learning community. To learn more about the CFRA program or other research activities, please email us at research-award@criteo.com.