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About me

I am an engineer and tech leader, with a passion for machine learning and distributed systems. I am a Director of Applied Science at Onfido. I am a reviewer for NeurIPS and ICML (since 2019) and ICLR (starting 2021).

Main achievements

• In 2005-2010, during my PhD years, I built end-to-end, real-time vision-based systems for navigation assistants under the supervision of the highly missed Prof. Seth Teller. This work was published at CVPR'07, ICCV'09 and ICRA'10.
• In 2006-2007, I was a core member of the MIT DARPA Challenge Team. We developed one of the first self-driving cars and reached fourth place in Finale (only six teams out of several dozens made it to the Finale). We published our design at IJFR'08. A defining chapter of my career!
• In 2018, I led a complete redesign of the Criteo recommendation engine using representation learning, at the scale of billions of users and millions of items. We delivered multiple-fold uplifts in clicks and sales on the Acquisition product. Paper under review.

Contact info

You can find me on Medium, Twitter, Google scholar, LinkedIn. You can email me at olivier.koch@gmail.com.

Blog posts

• The tradeoffs of large-scale machine learning: the price of time
• Your first 90 days as a tech lead
• Making your company machine learning-centric

Publications

• Ground robot navigation using uncalibrated cameras, ICRA 2010
• Body-relative navigation guidance using uncalibrated cameras, ICCV 2009
• A perception‐driven autonomous urban vehicle, IJFR 2008
• Wide-area egomotion estimation from known 3d structure, CVPR 2007

Bookshelf

• No filter: the inside story of Instragram. A true story written like a thriller.
• In the Company of Giants: Candid Conversations with the Visionaries of the Digital World. Remarkable interviews of sixteen titans of the tech industry. Published in 1997. A jewel to read in the hindsight.
• Trillion Dollar Coach: The Leadership Playbook of Silicon Valley's Bill Campbell. The unknwown life of the man behind the success of Steve Jobs, Larry Page and Eric Schmidt.
• The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business. A powerful guide to your habits and the ones of others.
• Thinking, Fast and Slow. This book will change the way you think about thinking.
• Freakonomics: Revised Edition. Why you should not be surprised by things you found surprising.
• The Manager's Path: A Guide for Tech Leaders Navigating Growth and Change. A must-read if you're wondering whether you should be a manager.
• The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable
• Monetizing Innovation: How Smart Companies Design the Product Around the Price