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Published: 25 August 2020

AFAM: Hello, Jean-Rodolphe, and thank you for participating in this interview series. Please tell us a few words about yourself. What do you do on a daily basis for your job?

Jean-Rodolphe: I am currently enjoying London on my way back from the US leveraging on the Anglo-saxon culture but closer to Europe. In my job I manage a pretty large team split between London and Paris with weekly trips to Paris. It mainly consists in ensuring the third line a defense as periodic control for the Group. It is a key internal audit function for the Bank while covering all the EMEA Global Markets and ALM treasury activities. My teams are performing audits to ensure the respect of the Group policies and procedures.

AFAM: How did you get where you are now? Given that at Arts et Metiers you were mostly studying industrial and mechanical engineering, how come that you ended up working as Deputy head of IG for Global Markets and ALM T at BNP Paribas?

Jean-Rodolphe: This is obviously not straight forward from my academically background and my current position. Nevertheless, there is a logic in my career which started at PwC and following a PhD preparation (DEA) in Paris at the same time of my third year at Arts et Metiers. After 8 years in strategic financial risks consulting I have switched to Risk management in banking at BNPP. Monitoring the Bank risks - mainly credit, market and counterparty risks - for a third of the bank, I had the opportunity to lead the risk stream for a major project in New York and San Francisco tackling all risks types for Global Markets activities and retail. It leads quite logically to my current position. Eventually the mental structure and the mathematical basis provided by the Arts et Métiers are key strength to leverage upon in banking with models and governance structure. It helps a lot as well while managing massive programs.

AFAM: You have been living in NYC for 4 years and now you live and work in London. Can you tell us a bit more about this change and where do you prefer to live and work?

Jean-Rodolphe: indeed, I miss New York and the thrill of the day to day life in the Big Apple... especially the New York Road runners’ races over the week end or Central Park runs at any time of the day and night. That said London is for me the perfect mix of Anglo-Saxon culture and European close location (even if UK is getting out of the EU - unfortunately!). This is a great step after the US to be able to get in London with such a dynamic and business-oriented mindset - it is almost as thrilling as in New York. The life style is very different in a large house with space and a small back yard. London parks are great to keep healthy runs year long without the heavy snow in winter and Manhattan heat in summer... as I said the best of the 2 worlds!

AFAM: What are the biggest challenges of your job?


Jean-Rodolphe: The biggest challenge of my job is to meet the regulatory expectations which are high and making sure to enforce the protection of the Group interest against wild practices or mis-conduct. The current remote working and geographical split between the 2 parts of the team is also a huge step between 2 cultures and way of working.

AFAM: What would be your advice to our students who would like to start in the finance industry (especially those who are willing to find an internship in the US or in Great Britain in 2021)?

Jean-Rodolphe: This is obviously a matter of willingness to learn and develop skills in a different environment. It requires open minds and work as per any start. Indeed, a finance degree in addition would be a plus in the most technical jobs but nothing is impossible while working hard on your own. The finance industry is currently facing news challenges in recruiting in retaining talents so I know there are a lot of opportunities to be leveraged upon - with a good level of English to start with and clear ideas on personal ambition ... just believe in yourself and go for it!

My initial internship with Merill Lynch within their Wealth Management department in New York has been instrumental in driving the beginning of my career. In essence both the experience and the brand helped out in orienting my career. The main driver for a Gadz to work in Finance is the open mind and the willingness to explore new subject discovering new fields.

AFAM: Thank you for your time!

Photo (courtesy of Jean-Rodolphe): Jean-Rodolphe in NYC during AAGEF Regatta on June 2018

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Published: 31 July 2020

AFAM: Hello, Sacha, and thank you for participating in this interview series. Please tell us a few words about yourself. What are you doing today at Kaiko and what is this company about?

Sacha: Thank you for your invitation and for making this series!  During my time at Arts et Métiers, I did an “S8” semester (which I think may not exist anymore) in Spain at UPV, then worked on wind-tunnel experiments for a space shuttle at the von Karman Institute in Belgium, moved to Paris to complete a double degree with a Research Master in Fluid Dynamics and Aeroacoustics during which I worked at Safran on the future of commercial aviation propulsion systems, and then moved to London to pursue a PhD sponsored by Innovate UK and Airbus at Imperial College on the physics of turbulence for drag reduction.  After this, I embarked on a journey to entrepreneurship that started at an AI venture founded by a friend from Imperial, then went on to study business and finance at MIT before a failed attempt to start my own company in the space of financial inclusion.  Right at that time, Kaiko was closing a seed round of financing and looking to expand to the US market.  Kaiko is a market data provider that focuses on building reliable data infrastructure for crypto currencies, we sit at the intersection of finance, crypto, and tech, and operate both in the centralized and decentralized ecosystems.  My role has been to open our US office and work with our engineering and business teams to improve our product as well as initiate our research efforts, in order to showcase our data and help clients make valuable use of it.

AFAM: From your LinkedIn profile we learned that prior to joining the crypto space, you were running computer simulations for the Aerospace industry. How can you explain this change? What was your motivation to switch to the financial sector? And how did you get where are you now?

Sacha: The funny thing is that I was technically running crypto calculations slightly before I got to get into Aerospace simulations. I first heard about a new electronic cash protocol on the amazing podcast Security Now (to which I still listen regularly, I highly recommend it!), it then took me some time to get to it and it was already too late to mine Bitcoin on my cheap personal laptop when I eventually did during my time at Arts et Métiers (my laptop had about 30min of battery life running CATIA V5), still, I did manage to mine some Dogecoin!  It did not take long though until I decided to dedicate this CPU usage to more scientifically productive calculations like studying the flow around a cylinder using a Boltzmann solver.

The desire to move to the financial sector arose slowly over time.  I guess the 2008 crisis occurring when I was in high school did not act as a catalyst when I was making long-term plans of what my career would look like after starting my undergrad.  Later, during my Research Master, I joined a team of engineers at Safran Aircraft Engines in the Paris area to work on aerodynamic performance of propellers.  I really loved this time spent at Safran where the team was outstanding both on management and engineering sides.  At the same time, I started wanting to understand how corporate decisions were made, for example: “Should we improve our existing engine, or should we build a new one with a new technology?”  Of course, real-life questions are not as simple and binary as this, especially given the long development cycles seen in aerospace, but it does illustrate when you try to come up with an answer that engineering is only one piece of the puzzle.  As frustrating as it may have been at the time for me to realize, most of this answer may come from a subtle combination of politics (public and internal), regulatory constraints, competitive dynamics, and (surprisingly for me back then) long-term predictions of oil prices.

I took a break from those considerations during my PhD at Imperial College London and shifted my focus to bringing a solid contribution to science.  Although it was a challenging time, just as it should, I count those years as some of the best of my life.  Little economic considerations, no politics (apart from a sudden exit from the European Union…), two incredible PhD advisors, life-long friends amongst the PhD cohort, the only things that mattered were intellectual curiosity and understanding the world we live in.  “The world we live in,” or perhaps more realistically a pixel of its infinite picture.  I was running numerical experiments on turbulence; it would take days of computing on tens of thousands of CPUs but then you would get a simulation so precise that the statistics would almost perfectly match a corresponding real-life experiment.  I felt I had a distilled a little bit of nature and I was running it from my computer.  I could visualize it in real time, pause it, then restart it, kill it, nurture it, all this from the tip of my fingers.  Sometimes the turbulence would die in the simulation so you would have to crank it up a little, and then I would check at night that the vortices looked healthy in the simulation, making sure the flow made its “transition” to a turbulent state so that I would have some statistics to aggregate the following morning.

Speaking of transitions, how did I make mine to finance?  After a rather unexpected series of events, my interest in the venture world led me to go from Imperial College, the birthplace of the most popular turbulence model (k-epsilon) to MIT, the birthplace of the most popular financial model (Black–Scholes–Merton).  At the end of the day, investing is about understanding how the world and our society work.  Understanding finance is essential if you wish to lead impactful projects, understand how decisions are made, and the cherry on top is that you get to work with passionate and smart people.  I believe that blockchain and crypto currencies make for a compelling narrative that acts as a catalyst to apply cryptographic technologies at unprecedented scales.  As an aside, I have not closed the door to aerospace, and I am confident that much of what I am learning now will be transferable if I have the opportunity to get back to it one day.

AFAM: What do you think is the best way or one of the ways to start in financial engineering especially for our students at Arts et Metiers with a major focus on mechanical and industrial engineering?

Sacha: There are many paths to financial engineering and many skills learnt in mechanical and industrial engineering are transferable to finance. There are a lot of data science techniques that are very much transverse between engineering and finance, just beware that the signal-to-noise ratio can be frustratingly lower in finance.  If you know how to perform a statistical test to ensure that your production is meeting your quality requirements, you can apply that to finance.  Having a strong understanding of statistics will open many doors in financial engineering.  In addition to the buzz words like machine learning and AI, numerical methods also come handy: The methods for solving partial differential equations are the same in engineering and finance, just as you are solving a constrained optimization problem for solving the production planning of your supply chain, you can do the same to optimize a portfolio of stocks.  However, bear in mind that there is more to finance than financial engineering and there are other areas of finance that may appeal to you.

AFAM: Andrew Sheng, a Hong-Kong based Malaysian Chinese banker, named by “Time” in 2013 “One of the 100 most influential people in the world” in an interview for the 2010 financial industry documentary “Inside Job” said: "Why should a financial engineer be paid four to a hundred times more than a real engineer? A real engineer builds bridges. A financial engineer builds dreams and, when those dreams turn out to be nightmares, other people pay for it."  What do you think about it?

Sacha: My first reaction to this would be to think of scalability.  When you build a bridge, a lot of the work you have to do is bespoke, less scalable, and the risks you bear are much more visible and understood in general.  Engineers have spent centuries understanding bridge failures, yet we don’t understand everything: the Tacoma bridge collapsed in the 1940s due to aeroelastic instabilities.  Since then advances have been made and the revolution in computer simulation is for sure contributing to the improvement of the models being used to prevent this from happening again.  However, faulty engineering does also come with consequences (material, social, and financial), and other people are paying for them.  Don’t get me wrong though: I am not implying that engineers should pay for it!

On the other end, financial engineers have their own models to describe the arcane financial system, they build bridges between risk pools so that projects can happen.  When a crisis strikes, some of those bridges collapse and, in part under the pressure of regulators, financial engineers update their models to prevent similar collapses from happening again.  Scalability means you can easily replicate those bridges in other places, however it also means that they can all blow up at the same time when a vulnerability brought to light.

I would argue that engineering has been catching up, it is scaling and starting to face some similar issues.  We see this with artificial intelligence and computer security.  Disparities consequently arise in salaries: take a PhD in Computer Vision and compare their salary to a mechanical engineer working on bridge design, I suspect they are not of the same order of magnitude.  Pushing this scalability one step further will take you back to the previous series of interviews you did on People and Robots: add robots into the mix and you introduce scalability for building and servicing the real world too!

Humans work and operate in networks; modern technology brought us from advancing at the speed of evolution and generation, to advancing at the speed of thought.  In a sense this is good for Progress (I try to remain optimistic on this), but sadly, network effects increase disparities and a simple thought experiment suffices to illustrate this point: imagine you get valued by the number of people you talk to.  Now just think of the difference between an Instagram influencer with millions of followers and someone living a happy life in the countryside mostly interacting with their close family and friends, you will find many orders of magnitude between the two.  Going back to the physics of turbulence, I would say that reducing friction increases the separation between scales, but I won’t bore you with this any further.

AFAM: financial sector is very popular among our students today. What would be your advice to those who will be looking for internships in a financial sector (including in the USA in 2021 as soon as the situation with visas is resolved)? 

Sacha: The first thing is to have a general understanding of the many facets of finance.  For this, I encourage students to reach out to alumni working in the space to learn how they got where they are and what they are working on (do not forget to contact Shasta program first!).  There are many ways to get exposure to finance especially quantitative finance, you can look at open projects, many platforms allow you to test algorithm without putting any real money behind it.  Having skin in the game is key for a financial practitioner but there is a lot you can learn before getting to this point.  Also have a look at Numerai, and if you are interested in the quant side, there are now many other resources available online.  Two other projects worth mentioning are Quantopian and Quandl.

Finance is as broad as its applications.  Engineering skills are particularly valued in quantitative finance but there are other areas of finance like Venture Capital that can provide an interesting blend of finance and engineering where your technical expertise in a field can be an edge.

Finally, I’d say find something you are passionate about and start building your professional network early with an open mind.  Be ready to adapt, the rate of change is accelerating.  Last but not least, in whatever you engage in, always remember that building for a better world is far more rewarding in the long term!

AFAM: Thank you for your time, Sacha!

Photo: courtesy of Sacha and Kaiko

More about Kaiko:

https://www.kaiko.com

Other resources:

Security Now podcast

Quantopian

Quandl

Details

Published: 28 July 2020

Remote internship: what's your point of view?

With the pandemic and work-from-home orders, with current suspension of the entry of J1-exchange visitors to the United States from June 24 to December 31, 2020, a new opportunity arise: leveraging interns remotely!

This is a win-win: the intern gains an essential industrial and international experience while remaining abroad, and you and your company have access to great skills in a more flexible manner, avoiding the costs induced by visa processing and relocation.

And, despite the initial intriguing legal and logistical questions which this new concept will trigger, this is happening anyway: we are already seeing examples on LinkedIn or as reported by a few AFAM members.

Our Shasta program is a key pillar of our AFAM mission and we are committed to keep it going despite the current adversity. We would love to hear from you on these questions:

- Would you or your company be willing to offer remote internships?
- Do you have experience on this topic you can share, or inputs/recommendations to make that work (best practices, tips)?
- As a member of our AFAM community, could you give a bit of your time and expertise to assist our Shasta candidates this Fall?

Thank you for This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. about these matters.

Let's keep helping our conscrits gain valuable North American experience!

Your Shasta committee:

Jean Pommier (An183), Corentin Lazarus (Me 209), Merwan Benhabib (Ch 203), Albina Patou-Chebykina (AFAM community manager)

Photo credit: www.careerbuzz.prosky.co

Details

Published: 03 July 2020

AFAM: Hello Audren, and thank you for willing to share with AFAM! After receiving your PhD at MIT, you found a position of a Research Scientist at Analog Garage, a branch of Analog Devices Inc. Please tell us more about your job. How is your typical day look like? Can you tell us about the projects you are working at?

Audren: Being a Research Scientist is quite alike being a Ph.D. student, except that your Research is more directly targeted at a given product rather than being of general interest. The idea is to develop new Research that is needed by a given product to achieve its desired performance, and as such, your Research is really well guided. My group at Analog Garage serves as an incubator for new product ideas, or as support for ongoing product developments within Analog Devices. As such, a typical day is always a mix between hardware and software development on the given product we are advancing. We also have several meetings with the Business Unit teams that will bring the product to market. This part of the job is really important, as it grounds the research work to focus on what the product really needs. Analog Devices has many different Business Units, and my projects varied from healthcare monitoring systems to the development of sensors for the automotive industry.

AFAM: can you tell us a bit more about your 8 years at MIT in master’s and later PhD program?

Audren: When I joined MIT in 2010, I had for main objective to learn as much about Robotics as I possibly could. I had only a few basic knowledge of Control Systems, and Mechanical Design, but I did not know much in terms of Algorithms, Sensing, Planning nor System Design. The Master degree gave me the opportunity to develop an underwater stingray robot, which necessitated to be fully integrated, with its own power, sensing, and control system. The project took 3 years to complete and it taught me how to advance a complex project with many different parts at play. With the Master degree completed, I decided to explore another field of Robotics: aerial drones. I have always been fascinated with flight, and I wanted my Ph. D. thesis to be focused on the development of an autonomous drone. This proved to be a five-year long endeavor, with many new domains of Robotics to discover and learn from. MIT is however a great place for that, as it proposes many Robotics courses taught with world-leading researchers. The classes you take are there to help you advance your research and learn all the tools you need to complete your thesis project. I particularly enjoyed how easy it is to plan out your curriculum, and to be able to choose each individual class. My Master and Ph. D. degrees took a long time to complete, but it gave me the opportunity to learn about many domains of Robotics, and to apply this knowledge into real systems.

AFAM: being in robotics today is it about business and professional opportunities or about changing the world?

Audren: Yes and yes! This is great time to be a Roboticist, with physical robots already in our homes (e.g. Roomba) or on the street (e.g. Tesla), and virtual robots answering our questions just by chatting with us (e.g. Siri). There are a lot of opportunities for commercial and industrial robotic developments, which used to be science-fiction, and can now become reality. I believe that these have the potential to greatly improve our quality of life,.provided that they are implemented carefully, with proper regulations and supervision in place. As an example, the promise given by autonomous driving is to drastically lower the number of car accidents, and to enable the advent of shareable robo-taxis that should help reduce an ever-growing traffic in dense urban areas. This vision will only work if the autonomous vehicle and human-operated ones can coexist safely on the same roads. It demands that autonomous vehicles properly adapt to any human behavior, and that regulatory institutions implement an appropriate legal framework to monitor and safely introduce autonomous vehicles on the public roads. We can pursue business opportunities and change the world, responsibly.

AFAM: robotics is a very broad sector. There are a lot of industries impacted by automation nowadays – transportation, manufacturing, healthcare, services, food (read our interviews in Food for Thought series), to mention a few. Which of the industries are undergoing the biggest transformations today according to you and where to look for major opportunities? What robotics companies/startups were impressive for you in the past year – 2 years? Could you give us TOP 5 US robotics startups to follow?

Audren: It's hard to pick one field in particular to nominate as the most impacted by robotics. Virtually every industry is affected by robotics progress, as robotics is often synonymous with repeatability, autonomy, and dependability. One sector that appears to be the most transformed by robotics is agriculture. Farms are a perfect environment for autonomous robots, as they provide a simple environment (usually a flat, obstacle-free, enclosed field), and the tasks to be performed are repetitive. Robots are also expected to transform warehouse management, with Amazon Robotics currently leading the way. As I mentioned earlier, we should eventually expect to see autonomous vehicles on the road, likely in delivery tasks or urban taxi networks. Regarding robotic companies that impressed me the most, I have to mention Skydio as my favorite one. Skydio offers what is possibly the most advanced autonomous robot available commercially: the Skydio 2. This drone is capable of flying itself in virtually any environment, mapping its way through and planning trajectories on-the-fly to avoid any detected obstacle. Other startups (and not so-much startups anymore) that I follow are Farmwise, Optimus Ride, RightHand Robotics, and Nutonomy.

AFAM: we have a lot of students every year looking for internship and later on, job opportunities in robotics (including on the US market). What advice would you give to these students? What skills and knowledge are crucial to acquire to be successful searching for internships?

Audren: The easiest path to obtaining an internship or job opportunity in the US is to be a student within the US, or to have graduated with an American degree. The reason is that there is a significant demand for employment, and it is simply easier to hire someone that already has a visa, that can be physically present for the job search, and whose references are familiar from a US perspective. The biggest advice I can share is to start early. I already had in mind to apply for a US Master when I started at Arts et Metiers, and I aligned my curricular choices with this goal in mind. There are also plenty of opportunities outside the US, with many of them within France. For instance, I did my first internship in Robotics at the Laboratoire d'Ingénierie des Systèmes de Versailles, and I learned about this position through the Arts et Metiers alumni network, which is a great resource of information. Make sure to contact AFAM (becoming a part of Shasta internship program if you are looking for an internship in the US) and former students that work in your field of interest, as they are most likely to share with you their insights on the field. Finally, the key to a successful job or internship search is to have a goal in mind and to align your search towards internships and jobs that can get you to that goal. If you show your prospective employer that you have planned out a path that is consistent with your career goals, you show that you are dedicated.

AFAM: Thank you, Audren, for sharing!

For more information:

Analog Garage

Photo: courtesy of Audren

Other interviews in "People and Robots" series:

with Ryan Lober (Class 212)

with Thomas Gurriet (Cl 212)