Rand, born 24th January 1985, is a bioinformatician, innovator and algorithm architect.
He is the founder of SNIPS (www.snips.net), at high-tech company aiming at revolutionizing healthcare through data analytics.
For the past 4 years, Rand has been working as freelance algorithm architect, specializing in social media data mining, artificial intelligence, and algorithmic trading. He has been contracted by a variety of organizations, from trading houses and hedge funds, to tech startups and non-profits.
Since coming back to Paris, Rand became an ambassador for a global entrepreneurial community called Sandbox (www.sandbox-network.com). More recently, he has been working with the major french entrepreneurial associations to create Univators (www.univators.org), a global network promoting technology startups with a social impact, leading to the creation of the first “TechCrunch” of social innovation.
He is frequently invited as a jury member in startup competitions, and participates in various media events on artificial intelligence, entrepreneurship, biotechnologies and the web 3.0. He was invited as a Young Leader of the Future at the Ambrosetti Forum 2011 to discuss Europe’s future. He is also the winner of the 2011 Foursquare Hackathon in Paris.
Rand started coding when he was 10, and in 1999, at the age of 14, co-created the first french social network (www.planetultra.net not active anymore), which attracted thousands of users within a few months. He then worked on several web-related freelance projects, from tourism to fashion and finance.
During his undergraduate years at University College London (UCL), he developed a pharmacogenomics web service to automatically predict HIV drug resistance from DNA, using artificial intelligence and genetics, leading him to a PhD in bioinformatics at the age of 21. His thesis was on energy functions for protein folding, but he also gave classes in Programming, Computer architecture, Neural networks, Artificial intelligence, Algorithmics and Formal logic.
During the summer of 2010, Rand was one of the 80 technologists selected from all around the world for a very exclusive 10 weeks program organized by Google and NASA called Singularity University (www.singularityu.org), in California, where he learned about exponentially increasing technologies, and how they could be applied to positively affect a billion people or more. While there, Rand worked on decentralizing food production using hydroponics and vertical urban farming.
Rand was invited alongside 30 highly successful professionals to be a founding participant at THNK (www.thnk.org), the Amsterdam school for creative leadership. His current challenge is on sustainability, in partnership with KLM, Schipol airport and the municipality of Amsterdam.
