Marc Torrens, PhD

In Spanish:

La Vanguardia – Dinero – 15 ene 2012 – Page #22

La Vanguardia – Dinero – 15 ene 2012 – Page #23

In Catalan:

La Vanguardia – Diners – 15 ene 2012 – Page #22

La Vanguardia – Diners – 15 ene 2012 – Page #23

My best professional experience was my living in Switzerland while pursuing my PhD at the EPFL and creating Iconomic Systems, SA with a group of very talented scientists and business enthusiasts. The EPFL has just published a brochure about its PhD School and they mention my experience to illustrate what a PhD at the EPFL could mean to anyone. It makes me extremely happy, I will be always very thankful for all things I’ve got from there. Thanks!

Doctoral School Brochure

I’ve met Gabriel Aldamiz-echevarría and María Arenaza in US when we were starting Strands all together. They have started a social e-commerce company for fashion passionated people called Chicisimo. Chicisimo is a social e-commerce website allowing people to share, discover and document their fashion preferences.

Chicisimo is nowadays the largest community around fashion in Europe just one year after its launch! We believe the fashion industry will be revolutionized in the upcoming years through the Internet. It is one of the industries that still needs to seriously consider Internet in its core business.

From a scientific point of view, the challenge is to exploit the collected data to extract collective intelligence and people trends. Here you have a sample of the type of data we are collecting.

You can find more information from Techcrunch or Wall Street Journal. I am very proud to be part of their Scientific Advisory board and hope we will make a large contribution to all fashionists on the streets out there!

Last September I was invited to participate in SEMATICA 2011 in Santiago de Compostela organized by researchers from the Centro de Investigación en Tecnoloxías da Información de la USC (CITIUS). It was organized as a Doctoral Seminar with scientific talks and contributions from the industry. I thought it was a very nice idea to give PhD students views on the topic they are working on from the academia and the industry so that they could have a more complete picture on their research topics. I had lots of fun sharing my experiences in applying AI ideas within startup companies. In addition to that, I discovered Santiago de Compostela and was astonished by that city. The old part is very beautiful and the people really nice. Thanks for the invitation!

IJCAI (International Join Conference on Artificial Intelligence) is the main worldwide conference gathering AI researchers and this year was organized by the IIIA (CSIC) in Barcelona. Nuria Oliver organized the Industry Day and invite a group of AI contributors from the industry including the main players and local companies such as Strands Labs. Here you can watch my presentation on the lessons that we have been learning at Strands on Recommendation technologies:

IJCAI 2011, Industry Day, Marc Torrens (Strands) from Marc Torrens on Vimeo.

Top internet players including Microsoft, Telefonica, Google, KXEN, IBM and Yahoo! presented and shared their vision and challenges in Artificial Intelligence (AI). Undoubtedly, a revolution in the Internet is occurring where the amount of available data presents a new world of possibilities in the field of AI. A reoccurring theme at the session was how each company will make use of the new data. Clearly many innovative and disruptive technologies will emerge in different domains, including new financial services!

More information can be found at the conference site.

Interview published at “Cinco Días” about Strands Finance on May 23rd, 2011.

These are the slides from the presentation I gave as Keynote for the Workshop on Practical Use of Recommender Systems, Algorithms and Technologies of the 4th ACM Recommender Systems 2010.

Today Strands was issued US Pat 7,797,321, “System for Browsing through a Music Catalog using Correlation Metrics of a Knowledge Base of Mediasets” by the USPTO. The inventors are Francisco Martin, Jim Shur, Marc Torrens.

Strands has been invited to present a research challenge at SynergyS22@Barcelona of the International Conference on Intelligent Networking and Collaborative Systems – INCOS 2009 organized by both 22@Barcelona and KIMbcn (Knowledge Innovation Market Barcelona). The session has included several presentations from local companies that are related to intelligent networking and and collaborative systems. The idea was to present a research challenge to the audience, and then bridge the gap between academia and industry with specific cases. This is the schedule of the event:

• 17:00 – 17.30 Registration
• 17:30 – 17.40 Welcome to SynergyS 22@Barcelona
• 17:40 – 17:45 SynergyS presentation
• 17:45 – 18:10 Companies challenges
• Yahoo Research
• CIP Microsoft
• Strands
• Dotopen
• Polymita
• EMascaro
• 18:10 – 19:00 Networking coffee

I think the format was very appropriate and the most important: we had fun!