About me#

Short bio#

Fabien Mathieu is the research leader at Swapcard where he works with his team focusing on diverse topics from explainable recommendations to matching algorithms.

Prior to Swapcard, he went back and forth between the industry and the academic worlds, working for Orange, Inria, and Bell Labs.

Former student from the École Normale Supérieure, he holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science, wrote more than 100 research papers, and supervised many PhD students.

FAQ#

Why is my Github username Balouf?#

The answer is actually simple: In South of France, where I was born, it is common to use the prefix Lou to form nickname, like El in Spanish.

For exemple, a good-looking person could be nicknamed Lou Bèu.

My nickname from Provence is just Lou Fab, after my first name, and I wanted to use it in Github but I registered too late and someone else already took it. So I scrambled the letters and balouf came out!

Technomage ?!?!?!#

I chose the job title technomage because it is much cooler than Senior AI Research Scientist.

I have been in many companies and each of them has its own system of grades and positions:

  • In Orange there was a category system. E-people aim for F, F people aim for G…

  • In the academic world there is assistant/professor (or researcher/director), up to the uncategorized category.

  • In Bell Labs, two independent systems of class (III-A) and grades (10) existed simultaneously, not to mention the ultimate Distinguished Member of Technical Staff (DMTS) title.

  • Swapcard has a traditional junior/senior system with sub-grades, but they allowed me to define my own title ;)

It can be easy to get lost, so I decided to craft my own title. As a fan of Babylon 5, I ended up with Technomage.