A graduate of the École Centrale Paris, I have been working as a technologist for 20+ years in France, Japan, Canada and the UK. I have focused my career on leading the open web to its full potential, creating responsible technology, and working to advance the various facets of open technology: open standards, open source, open data and open innovation.
I am at my best leading teams and clients through complexity, whether exploring and explaining the impact of technology, creating consensus in a standards group, launching a new product, or conducting cutting-edge research.
Experience
Head of Research and Development at The Open Data Institute (UK)
Since April 2020. Formerly Head of Technology from July 2017 to March 2020.
The Open Data Institute is an independent, non-profit organisation advising governments and organisations worldwide to build a better, more trustworthy data ecosystem. As its head of Research and Development I lead the ODI’s R&D, product and service discovery work, with a focus on engagement with academia and experts, user research, and technology prototyping.
My team adds in-depth expertise to the ODI’s advisory activities on topics including data infrastructure, emerging data technology, policy and society, standards, and innovating with data. I oversee £2.5m worth of R&D programmes, projects and innovation funds yearly, and also steward the ODI’s work on data ethics and responsible technology.
Senior Technologist (then) Executive Producer at BBC R&D (UK)
Jan 2011 – June 2017: Led a portfolio of research projects and new product development around content discovery: personalisation (recommendations, user data), curation (aggregation, tagging), applied machine learning and natural language processing (for content analysis).
Responsibilities ranged from short experiments to multi-year, highly strategic innovation projects, leading and managing cross-disciplinary teams of up to 15 members from ideation and contextual user research all the way to delivery.
I was also coordinating all of the BBC's engagement in web standards and their application in tangible innovation, chaired the W3C Web Audio working group, and was the W3C Advisory Committee Representative for the BBC for more than 6 years.
Innovation Lead & Web Architect at Pheromone (Canada)
Apr 2009 – Dec 2011: With a team of experts from this Montreal-based agency, I defined product strategy, design direction and technological architecture for Web products and services: social networks, online communities, web sites and mobile applications. I also created and managed a lightweight innovation process resulting in many successful prototypes and products for our company and our clients.
Tech co-Founder at Art Beat / Gadago NPO (Japan / USA)
2004 – 2008: co-founded Art Beat, an international network of multilingual web sites providing information and services on the Art and Design scene in major cultural cities. Built its entire technical foundations, led further development. Co-founded and ran the non-profit organisation overseeing ArtBeat and other culture-related services.
Technical Staff at W3C (Japan / Worldwide)
Oct 2000 – Apr 2009: as part of the core team of the World Wide Web Consortium for over 8 years, my role evolved from Systems Developer, evangelist for web standards to being Product/Dev Lead for W3C's Open Source Services (including the popular validator tools).
Intrusion Testing activity lead at MasterSecurity (France)
Dec 1998 – Sept 2000: Launched and led the infosec / intrusion testing lab for this systems and security consulting SME.
Selected Talks, Interviews and Publications
Data Policy and Tech Ethics
- Designing trustworthy data institutions
- Research report, the Open Data Institute
- Truth, Trust and Technology
- Talk for ODI Friday Lunchtime Lectures (2019)
- Où en est-on de l'open data en France ?
- Signatory of Open Letter, Les Echos (2019)
- Reflections on the French data landscape
- Blog post for the Open Data Institute (2019)
- ‘How to understand and monitor a city data ecosystem to help make better decisions
- Blog post for the Open Data Institute (2019)
- What data publishers need: synthesis of user-research
- Research report, the Open Data Institute (2018)
- ‘Computer says no’: How open data can mitigate the dangers of black box AI
- Article for Computing (2018)
- The role of data in AI business models
- Research report, the Open Data Institute (2018)
- Oral Evidence, Select Committee on Artificial Intelligence
- UK House of Lords (2017)
Emerging Technology Research
- An introduction to synthetic data
- Interview by DataIQ (2019)
- Anonymisation and synthetic data
- Reports and other R&D outputs, Open Data Institute (2019)
- Tamper-Proofing Video Archives Using Temporal Content Hashes on the Blockchain
- Conference Paper for The IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (2019)
- ARCHANGEL: Trusted archives of digital public documents
- Conference Paper for ACM Symposium on Document Engineering (2018)
Culture and Content Discovery
- Using Algorithms to Understand Content
- Blog post for BBC R&D as part of Editorial Algorithms project (2015-17)
- Bilingual Tokyo Online
- Interview in Art Space Tokyo (2008)
- Give them what they want - Tokyo Art Beat puts art listings in your hands
- Interview/Profile in Japan Times (2005)
Open Web, Open Innovation and Open Source
- Data and Covid-19: why standards matter
- ODI blog post on the ODI's Open data for Covid-19 initiative (2020)
- The Rusty Web
- Essay in complement to conference talk, Paris Web (2013)
- Audio on the Web - Rediscovering the era of the Radiophonic Workshop
- Blog post for BBC R&D (2012)
- Web Audio API
- W3C Specification, contributed as working group Chair, World Wide Web Consortium (2011-13)
- Innover de 9 à 5
- Talk at Paris Web Conference (2010)
- W3Cの基盤はオープンソース
- Report on talk at OSC2006 Tokyo, Nikkei XTech (2006)
- Common HTTP Implementation Problems
- W3C Note, World Wide Web Consortium (2003)
Education and Training
Ecole Centrale Paris (France)
Graduated in 2000 with an M.Eng. degree from Ecole Centrale Paris (now CentraleSupelec, part of Université Paris-Saclay), one of France's elite campuses aiming to train top industry managers for Europe and beyond.
BBC Academy (UK)
Training with the BBC Academy including Product Management (2011-2012), First Aid / AED Certification (2012) and Creative Leadership Accreditation (BBC/NYU, 2012-15)
Coursera
Using this popular MOOC service to learn new skills and refresh old ones - from competitive strategy to Mandarin Chinese. I have received a certificate of completion of the course on Machine Learning led by Stanford's Andrew Ng (2016).
References upon request. More info on Linkedin.