Artificial intelligence expert Françoise Soulié has over 40 years’ experience working with neural networks, machine learning, social network analysis and Big Data in academia and in industry. She is a co-founder of Hub France Intelligence Artificielle, a French organization that aims — through a bottoms up approach — to help create an AI industrial sector in France and Europe . She is also a member of the AI High Level Experts Group that is currently working with the European Commission on an AI strategy for Europe.

A graduate of École Normale Supérieure, Soulié holds a PhD from University of Grenoble. She was a professor at the University of Paris 11-Orsay, where she was advisor to 20 PhDs working on neural networks and deep learning, including Yann LeCun, who later went on to become Facebook’s Chief AI Scientist. Soulié later funded a startup called Mimetics to develop a neural-network based optical-character product, joined Atos as head of a data mining in the data warehouse group and worked at Business & Décision as a Partner where she created and headed the Customer Relationship Management business unit. At KXEN, she was vice-president of Innovation until the company was acquired by SAP. She then joined Institut Mines Télécom where she worked for the Big Data platform TeraLab. Most recently she worked as a professor at the School of Computer Software at Tianjin University in China, where she headed the Data Science team. She is currently running a her consulting company in Data Mining and AI called Soulié Data Conseil (SDC). Soulié has co-authored more than 140 scientific publications and 13 books. She recently spoke to The Innovator about what Europe needs to do to be competitive in AI.