Engineering of Research

Frédérick Giasson

Machine Learning, Engineering & Data

Frédérick Giasson

Machine Learning, Engineering & Data

My career as a data and machine learning engineer didn't start with a degree or a business plan; it started with a book.

That book was "Foundation" by Isaac Asimov. Asimov's fictional science of psychohistory opened my eyes to the world of data, statistics, and their profound impact on human history.

My first successful AI attempt was to program a team of small robots that played soccer at the RoboCup US Open in 2003 in Pittsburgh and 2004 in New Orleans. Sensors and vision data were flowing in, and individual robot and group decisions needed to be made. Everything relied on data to lead to actions that fulfilled a common goal. This experience dictated all the research and development I would undertake in the next fifteen years.

Since then, I co-founded Structured Dynamics LLC. and Cognonto Corp. As their CTO, I had to research and engineer innovative approaches and techniques for managing and leveraging data in the field of the semantic web, machine learning, and knowledge graph management. I co-developed two knowledge graphs, integrated hundreds of data sources, linked millions of entities, created and managed hundreds of machine learning models, and co-developed an open-source semantic data management platform. I also engineered multiple machine learning pipelines.

Then, I pivoted to be a manager and the head of research, design, and development of Rakuten Ready's machine learning platform. That platform implements pipelines that integrate its terabytes of data warehouse to train, optimize, and evaluate thousands of models in parallel. It constantly evaluates tens of thousands of models deployed in its production environment, enabling tens of thousands of predictions to be performed per second.

Currently, I am thriving in my role as a Senior Data Development Manager at Shopify. Leading the Machine Learning Platform, I have the privilege to create and guide world-class teams in the development of Shopify's Machine Learning Platform, fostering a strong machine learning culture. We design, architect, and develop an end-to-end platform that supports more than 500 data scientists, defining the best machine learning practices in coordination with the data science technical leadership group.

CURRENT AND PAST PROJECTS

Here is the list of all the major projects I created in the last decade. Click on any of these for a short description of the project.