Joaquin Quiñonero Candela

Joaquin Quiñonero Candela is the Director of Engineering at Facebook. His team drives product innovation through applied research in computer vision, speech recognition, language understanding, personalization and recommendations, as well as production-grade AI platforms. They partner closely with FAIR, Infrastructure and with product teams to improve every aspect of the Facebook experience.

In 2012 Candela built and taught a new ML course at the Engineering Department at University of Cambridge, together with Carl Rasmussen. Between 2007 and 2012 he worked at Microsoft Research in Cambridge, UK, and built the click prediction and auction optimization teams at Microsoft AdCenter. At Microsoft he also had the opportunity to help build a Go game for the Xbox 360 called “The Path of Go.”

Between 2004 and 2007 Candela was a postdoctoral researcher at the Fraunhofer Institute in Berlin and at the Technical University of Berlin with Klaus-Robert Müller. Before that, he was a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics. He received his PhD from the Technical University of Denmark in 2004, where he worked for 3 years with Lars Kai Hansen, Jan Larsen and Ole Winter in the Intelligent Signal Processing group.

Candela was born in Valencia, Spain, and moved to Morocco when he was 3. At the age of 18 he moved to Madrid where he studied telecommunications engineering. He is fluent in Spanish, French, English and German and can understand and speak some Danish and Arabic.