I am the Director of Engineering at Facebook. Our team drives product innovation through applied research in computer vision, speech recognition, language understanding, personalization and recommendations, as well as production-grade AI platforms. We partner closely with FAIR, Infrastructure and with product teams to improve every aspect of the Facebook experience.
In 2012 I built and taught a new ML course at the Engineering Department at University of Cambridge, together with Carl Rasmussen. Between 2007 and 2012 I worked at Microsoft Research in Cambridge, UK, and built the click prediction and auction optimization teams at Microsoft AdCenter. At Microsoft I also had the opportunity to help build a Go game for the Xbox 360 called “The Path of Go.”
Between 2004 and 2007 I was a postdoctoral researcher at the Fraunhofer Institute in Berlin and at the Technical University of Berlin with Klaus-Robert Müller. Before that, I was a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in the beautiful town of Tübingen in Southern Germany, working with my PhD advisor Carl Rasmussen and with Bernhard Schölkopf. I received my PhD from the Technical University of Denmark in 2004, where I worked for 3 years with Lars Kai Hansen, Jan Larsen and Ole Winter in the Intelligent Signal Processing group.
I was born in Valencia, Spain, and moved to Morocco when I was 3. At the age of 18 I moved to Madrid where I studied telecommunications engineering. I have been lucky to be able to learn languages, and I am fluent in Spanish, French, English and German. I can understand and speak some Danish and can still remember some Arabic.
I am a passionate runner, and I have got into ultra-marathon running the past couple of years. I enjoy playing the guitar and singing to it.
Interests
Machine learning, computer vision, language technology, augmented reality, Bayesian inference and probabilistic reasoning
Latest Publications
ADKDD - August 24, 2014
Practical Lessons from Predicting Clicks on Ads at Facebook
Xinran He, Junfeng Pan, Ou Jin, Tianbing Xu, Bo Liu, Tao Xu, Yanxin Shi, Antoine Atallah, Stuart Bowers, Joaquin Quiñonero Candela
JMLR - December 16, 2013
Counterfactual Reasoning and Learning Systems: The Example of Computational Advertising
Leon Bottou, Jonas Peters, Joaquin Quiñonero Candela, Denis Charles, Max Chickering, Elon Portugaly, Dipankar Ray, Patrice Simard, Ed Snelson
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