Laurent Ach

- Led cross-functional teams of engineers, data scientists, infrastructure, and security experts to develop a large-scale, privacy-focused web search engine. - Oversaw the design of machine learning pipelines for crawling, signal extraction, ranking, indexing, and query understanding, as well as the integration of generative AI - Set technical direction and priorities across AI, product, and infrastructure, ensuring alignment with strategic and privacy objectives. - Contributed to executive decision-making as a member of the C-level Direction Committee, shaping product vision and roadmap.

- Created and led the European branch of the Rakuten Institute of Technology, the research and innovation organization of the Rakuten Group. - Built a team from scratch, recruiting and managing researchers and engineers in deep learning, natural language processing, and computer vision. - Directed applied research projects on recommender systems, product categorization, and ad targeting, guiding teams from initial prototypes to integration in large-scale Rakuten services. - Collaborated with technical and business teams across Rakuten's global ecosystem (Japan, US, France, etc.) to align research outputs with strategic business needs. - Defined the R&D roadmap and ensured successful technology transfer from research to production environments within the Group.

- Member of company C-level Direction Committee - Director of software development, QA, and product catalog teams, for the French E-Commerce website (front-end, back-end) and mobile apps of Rakuten Group. - Modernization of the legacy platform and interconnection with other group online marketplaces - GDPR compliance

Manager of the R&D team developing Living Actor™, a technology of virtual characters for chat and video communication, and interactive assistants. Leading the development of web services and on-line applications, including computer graphics and natural language processing features. Management of European and French collaborative research projects. The company was later acquired by Visiativ

Creation of processes and tools to manage and ensure the compliance of mobile phones with operators' technical requirements

Manager of a software development team for the creation of an innovative 3D streaming technology, similar to Google Earth

Some projects I worked on as a lead developer - A multi-sensor track fusion system using neural networks - A character recognition system using neural networks to read submarine depth maps - Realistic 3D rendering of cars for Renault (France) and Honda (Japan) - Several European Research projects in the domain of Virtual Reality - A mission debriefing system with 3D replay of on-board recorded aircraft trajectories