Why an independent view
I am a senior research scientist at Inria, in Sophia Antipolis, France, and I hold a habilitation to supervise research (HDR). For more than twenty years, my job has been to ask questions nobody has answered yet, to collect the data needed to answer them, and to defend the method before the most demanding reviewers in the field. My work is published in the leading conferences on networking, systems and privacy, and several of my studies were covered by the international press.
Three of these works show what I can do. The analysis of the entire Twitter social graph, more than five hundred million accounts, which established that most shared articles are never read. The analysis of the whole Bitcoin blockchain, sixteen billion links, to find funds that are lost forever. Years of measurements of BitTorrent exchanges, which showed that the anonymity promised by some tools did not exist. Each time: data that nobody had processed at this scale, on a single machine, and results that are only worth something because the method held up.
I also left the lab twice to work in industry: as CTO assistant at a video streaming startup, then as founder of a startup whose app was downloaded by more than one million people. I know what a decision made with incomplete data, a tight budget and a deadline looks like.
Since 2011, I have trained engineers and researchers in Python and data science, in companies and through a MOOC followed by more than one hundred and fifty thousand people. What these years have taught me is that most teams do not need more tools; they need to understand what the ones they have actually do.
The consulting I offer follows from all this. I sell no platform, no license and no development days. I look at your code, your data and your analyses the way I look at a paper submitted to a conference: with the idea that the only thing that matters is whether it is right.
My career and research →