Joaquin Quiñonero Candela

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