Marc Torrens

Education

• Ph.D. Ecole polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (1998 — 2002)
• M.S. Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (1992 — 1997)

Areas of interest

• Artificial Intelligence
• Machine Learning
• Data Science
• Recommender Systems
• Entrepreneurship

Biography

Marc Torrens is a Computer Science engineer from the Polytechnic University of Catalonia (UPC, Barcelona) and holds a PhD in Artificial Intelligence from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL, Lausanne).

Marc has published more than 20 papers in international conferences and journals, and is the inventor of more than 20 patents on recommendation and personalization technologies. He also co-chaired the ACM Conference on Recommender systems in 2010 with more than 400 experts from the academy and the industry. He also regularly participates as reviewer in several international conferences on Artificial Intelligence. His research focusses on how Artificial Intelligence can be applied to solve problems business and people are facing. Marc is convinced AI technology will help humans to overcome some of the challenges we always had and dramatically improve our lives.

Rather than following a traditional academic career, Marc spent more than 20 years creating startups around Artificial Intelligence. He cofounded Strands, Inc. in 2004, an established and recognized global Fintech company working for top tier banks worldwide including Barclays, Deutsche Bank, BBVA, ING, Bank of Montreal, BNP Paribas, Santander, Discount Bank, just to mention a few. From 2004 to 2018, Marc has been working at Strands as Chief Innovation and Product Officer and currently serves the company as member of the Board of Directors. One of the most remarkable achievements of the company was to build a portfolio of 20+ patents around recommendation technology that was acquired by Apple, Inc.

His genuine motivation is to bridge the gap between the outputs of scientific research and the inputs needed by real-world AI systems. Marc is passioned about bringing all his state-of-the-art knowledge in Artificial Intelligence and Entrepreneurship to ESADE to develop brilliant managers, executives and entrepreneurs that transform the world in which we live.