MARC TORRENS

In 2004, Marc co-founded Strands, Inc. and is currently serving Strands as Chief Innovation Officer. He brings expertise in bridging the gap between the outputs of scientific research and the inputs needed by real-world Internet applications in the finance industry. He enjoys overcoming new business challenges with state-of-the-art 
technology in the areas of Artificial Intelligence, Usability, Data Visualization, and Product Design. Prior to Strands, Marc co-founded Iconomic Systems SA in 1999 and served the company as Chief Technology Officer. Iconomic Systems developed software for planning travel on the Internet. The company was sold to i:FAO AG (Germany) in 2001.

He is co-inventor of several patents for Iconomic Systems and Strands. Marc has also published more than 20 referred papers on his work in international conferences and journals on Artificial Intelligence and Usability. He also regularly participates in conference committees (IJCAI, ECAI, AAAI, ACM EC, ACM RecSys, UMAP, and others) and has been 
chair of several workshops and conferences, recently including the ACM International Conference on Recommender Systems 2010. Marc Torrens received a M.Sc. degree in Computer Science from the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC), Barcelona,
Catalonia, in 1997, and a PhD in Computer Science from the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Lausanne, Switzerland, in 2002. He also has a postgraduate Certificate in Entrepreneurship, organized by CREATE (Chair of Entrepreneurship at EPFL).

Strands develops products that help people find information online that they want and need. Strands offers production recommendation services for eCommerce, interactive tools for personal finance management, and personal interest and lifestyle-oriented social
discovery solutions. Strands also operates moneystrands.com, a personal finance management platform, and fitness.strands.com, a training log and information source for active people. In this talk, Strands Chief Innovation Officer, Marc Torrens, PhD, will discuss Strands' "Top 10 Lessons Learned" from their experience building and deploying recommender systems for a wide range of customers. The lessons learned will range from customer relations and marketing, to business planning, to the technical. As recommender technology becomes ubiquitous online, and even overshadows search in many commercials settings, Strands has found these "Top 10 Lessons Learned" continue to be valuable guidelines.