Another year has passed, and we came together to celebrate our accomplishments and honor the Criteo R&D Ambassadors who contributed to our success.
At Criteo R&D, we are a welcoming community of experts connected by our passion for tech. Sharing knowledge helps us build bigger and better together, which is the primary motivation for the R&D Community.
To honor this, we recently held our second Community Awards, reflecting on our accomplishments over the past year. During this event, we celebrated the finalists and announced the winners for 2024. 🎉
The ceremony was once again hosted by Kini (Head of Developer Relations) and Diarmuid (Chief Technology Officer).
2024 in retrospect
Summarizing everything in just a few slides is difficult, and we probably overlooked the most important aspect: our people. A more effective way to reflect on the year could be to create a brief 2-minute video that captures our memories from this year. What do you think? 😃 👇
Do you like numbers?
During 2024:
- We have organized 22 events at our offices. While we offer space for knowledge sharing at the Criteo Tech Meetups, we aim to emphasize our collaboration with external tech communities, which account for about 60% of all events. This clearly illustrates our commitment to community building.
- We have attended 37 conferences. With the support of our R&D Ambassadors, we’ve participated in various developer and researcher events featuring over 30 speakers, accepted more than 30 papers, and secured seven sponsorships. Together, we share knowledge, learn, and grow. We enjoy involving others in our field and making a positive difference.
- We have published 75 articles on this very tech blog. That means we have published one or two (and sometimes even three) articles per week! But the most important metric is in the background: more than 40 different writers wrote those articles.
The data clearly indicates that the Criteo R&D Community is highly active and expanding each year. We recognize that there is always potential for growth. At Criteo R&D, you’re either succeeding or learning. This mindset drives us to advance and continue striving for the impact we wish to make on others.
Awards Ceremony
Like in the last edition, we featured five categories, each with three finalists: Best Speaker of the Year, Best Article of the Year, Best Paper of the Year, Best Community Builder of the Year, and Best Open Source Project of the Year. Kini selected the candidates for each award (except for the best paper — that was Liva’s duty), and all Criteos in R&D were allowed to vote. Approximately 100 individuals contributed to the selection process.
The Community Honorary Member
We all have teammates who are always ready to lend a hand, no matter the circumstances. These are the individuals who go above and beyond, contributing selflessly to elevate the team’s culture and performance. Our beloved Peter Milne, affectionately known as Uncle P., exemplifies this spirit.
Peter has profoundly influenced countless Criteos through his wisdom, serving as both a role model and a mentor. Many have benefited from his guidance, becoming better engineers, public speakers, and technical writers under his mentorship. As he retires this month, we want to take a moment to acknowledge the invaluable impact he has made on all of us.
Thank you for everything, Uncle P.
Best Article of the Year
Will Angular Signals kill state management libraries like NgRx and NGXS? by Xavier Dupessey — The most read article of the year by far (leading to interesting conversations in the comments).
Will Angular Signals kill state management libraries like NgRx and NGXS?
We test Signals with a POC to see if it could replace and become the final state management mechanisms for Agular…
techblog.criteo.com
Can you trust your OpenAPI spec?🤨 by Jean-Baptiste Muscat-Dupuis — One of the articles that got attention and many reactions on our channels really quickly.
Can you trust your OpenAPI spec?🤨
Tools and tips to be sure your API behaves how you document it.
techblog.criteo.com
Why your DevEx journey matters by Michaël Bétemps — The DevEx Journey at Criteo series.
Why your DevEx journey matters
Over 70 years of software development, yet most firms still overlook Developer Experience management. Will DevEx…
techblog.criteo.com
Best Community Builder of the Year
Erwan Velu has contributed a lot on different topics:
- Promoting the idea of Volunteer PTO days for Open Source
- Prem’Day organizer
- KernelRecipes organizer
Khanh Tuong Maudoux is a key asset to tech communities in France:
- DATANOSCO Conference organization
- Help with DevoxxFR (booth activities, CFP process, volunteering during the event, etc)
- Active collaboration with ParisJUG and Scala community (promoting Criteos to attend, creating relationships with communities, etc)
- Volunteering at many other meetups/events at the office
Marina Altés’s work on diversity and inclusion is remarkable:
- Active collaboration with tech communities in BCN
- Community building with “Women in Tech” organizations
- Promoting internal activities in collaboration with Criteo Care & Communities
Best Open Source Project of the Year
hwbench (GitHub — criteo/hwbench: hwbench is a benchmark orchestration tool to automate the low-level testing of servers.) — hwbench is a benchmark orchestrator to automate the low-level testing of servers. Introduced by Anisse Astier at PremDay 2024
JIRA Task Flow Visualizer(GitHub — criteo/jira-task-flow-visualizer ) — Created by Concetto Antonino Privitera.
JIRA Task Flow Visualizer
An open-source tool to visualize task dependencies
techblog.criteo.com
A Perfview Alternative in WebAssembly (.NET Events Viewer ) — Created by Grégoire Verdier
A Perfview Alternative in WebAssembly
A modern alternative to PerfView to analyze nettrace files collected from the .NET runtime’s EventPipe or through the…
techblog.criteo.com
Best Paper of the Year
Logarithmic Smoothing for Pessimistic Off-Policy Evaluation, Selection and Learning. Otmane Sakhi Imad Aouali et al, because it was a Spotlight paper at NeurIPS and also RecSYS & co-authored by a PhD student –
Research Card: Logarithmic Smoothing for Pessimistic Off-Policy Evaluation, Selection, and Learning
We discuss a new method for off-policy evaluation, selection, and learning in interactive systems.
techblog.criteo.com
FairJob: A Real-World Dataset for Fairness in Online Systems, Mariia Vladimirova (Criteo), Federico Pavone (Paris-Dauphine), Eustache Diement (ex-Criteo) at NeurIPS because it’s a dataset paper.
Research Card: FairJob – A Real-World Dataset for Fairness in Online Systems
Research Card on how to make the outcome prediction in online systems fairer?
techblog.criteo.com
DU-Shapley: A Shapley Value Proxy for Efficient Dataset Valuation. In NeurIPS 2024, Benjamin Heymann, Maxime VONO, Vianney Perchet et al, NeurIPS 2024 because it might shape the future of the company, and it’s a FAIRPLAY paper
LOCOST: State-Space Models for Long Document Abstractive Summarization Song DUONG, Alberto Lumbreras because DL/NLP, EACL Prize
Our experience at EACL’24
Our highlights from the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics latest edition where we won…
techblog.criteo.com
Best Speaker of the Year
Sylvain DEDIEU is one of our most active tech speakers at Criteo R&D. He has been very busy this year speaking at different places:
- SnowCamp 2024
- VoxxedDays Luxembourg
- DevoxxBE
- DevFest Nantes
- CriteoTech Meetup Grenoble Talk & Organization
Jaspreet Kaur Sandhu has made a remarkable contribution to the Generative AI topic at several places this year:
- CriteoTech Meetup Paris
- European Women in Technology (co-speaker with Arij SAKHRAOUI)
- Babbel Innovates 2024 (co-speaker with Arij SAKHRAOUI )
- Women Do Tech Too Conference talk
Estelle Thou has represented Criteo at a couple of external venues and has organized the first WDTT conference at Criteo Paris:
- SnowCamp 2024
- Devoxx Poland
- Women Do Tech Too Conference Keynote & Organization
And the winner is…
- Article of the Year: Can you trust your OpenAPI spec?.
- Community Builder of the Year: Marina Altés.
- Open Source Project of the Year: hwbench.
- Paper of the Year: FairJob: A Real-World Dataset for Fairness in Online Systems.
- Speaker of the Year: Sylvain Dedieu.
We cannot be prouder of our Criteos and the community they nurture every day. Everyone deserves recognition and an award. Once again, the ceremony was a testament to our community’s hard work and dedication, and we hope that this recognition will inspire everyone to continue their pursuit of innovation.
Congratulations to all the winners and finalists! 🏆
Are you interested in becoming a part of this exceptional tech team? 👇
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