Jean-Noël Rivasseau

CTO / Founder at Kameleoon. Entrepreneur and expert software engineer.

What I'm doing these days

January, 2021: I've been living in Moscow, Russia since 2013. I enjoy life here quite a lot. Moscow is an hyperactive megapolis, probably similar to new York City. It's very different from Paris. On the professional side of things, lots of luck and even greater amounts of work allowed me to lift my startup company, Kameleoon, off the ground. We currently have offices in 6 countries in the world, with 200 people working to develop the best CRO (Conversion Rate Optimization) platform in the world.

May, 2008: It's been a while since I wrote here, but anyway. On January 2007, I left OCS to work at FastBooking. It was really nice because it was a small startup company, and they used an entire OSS stack. I gained a lot of experience there, especially in the domain of web applications that I probably will stay in.

However, I decided to start my own enterprise in 2008. My idea was to build a business in the e-commerce domain, by leveraging as much as possible the best free technologies available in the web area.

May, 2006: Almost a year since the last update... First, I received my UBC degree after completing my thesis in October. Then, I accepted a job at Oberthur Card Systems, a manufacturer of smart cards. I am very happy about this first job as a software engineer. We are living in Courbevoie, a town near Paris. I have started to learn PHP to update the site and to better maintain it. I soon plan to add a MySQL database and to install a Wiki (my site is now hosted on my own Apache server).

Oberthur CS Logo

June, 2005: I am currently finishing my Master degree at the Computer Science Department of UBC, Vancouver, Canada. I will be done by the end of August, once I have written my thesis (about inference algorithms on undirected graphical models). We (my wife and I) plan to then go back to France, where I will start looking for a job. Ideally, I hope to find a CS related job, in France, where I could use some of the experience I learned here at UBC, so a R & D job (along with some programming tasks) would probably be the best opportunity. My dream would be to work for Google ;-) !

April, 2005: I wasn't at the graduation ceremony, but I received my final degree from Ecole Polytechnique in France! This degree is highly valued in France, so I will probably be able to find a job without trouble there. The hard part is to find an interesting job...

October 2004 - January 2005: I did an internship at Schlumberger as a software engineer. My task was to design and code (in C) a general solver for finding the optimum of a fitness function over a multidimensional space. Due to confidentiality, the report for this research work isn't available online. I combined several optimum searching policies to come with a new hybrid algorithm. It performed better that the previous solver used by Schlumberger in its BorFlow software package, and I think it will be integrated into the next commercial version of this software.

2003-2005: After finishing my studies at France's "very special" engineering school, Ecole Polytechnique, I was away from my home country of France, studying in the CS Department of UBC, Vancouver, Canada.

The UBC CS Department is really nice, with lots of smart and interesting people. In my opinion, it will probably even get better in the coming years, with a lot of new brilliant people coming in. The best thing to do if you are interested in studying CS at UBC is probably to visit the Department's home page, which by the way is very well done. You can also e-mail me if you want some advice, I'll be glad to answer, especially if you are from France!

UBC Logo

I am doing a Masters program here, which is basically divided in two periods. First you get to take some courses here (6 or more), then you start on your research (wich ends with a Masters thesis). I have finished the first part in April 2004 (having taken 6 courses, which you can see here ). I am taking the 2004-2005 year to do my research and wrap up my thesis. After some reflexion, I decided not to go for a Ph. D. directly after my Msc., so once I am graduated from UBC (August 2005), I will work in the industry.

My supervisor is Nando de Freitas, and together we are interested in machine-learning, Monte Carlo algorithms, probabilistic graphical models, and so on. You can read more about about my current research interests here.

I'd like to add that I chose to go to Vancouver not only because I thought it would be a valuable experience, but also because British columbia and Vancouver are so nice regions. The nature here is really breathtaking sometimes. If you like nature, hiking and great outdoors, Vancouver is a really nice place to go to.

© 2003-2021, Jean-Noel Rivasseau.