Meet Guillaume, R&D Engineer at Kardinal
- August 31, 2021
- 2 mins
Proactive and solution-oriented, Guillaume is a Research and Development Engineer at Kardinal since April 2019.
A true expert in transportation planning
Drawn to computer science, Guillaume began his studies in computer engineering at the Université Technologique de Compiègne where he had the opportunity to spend a year in Mexico to do a semester of study and an internship. Once he graduated, he decided to pursue another degree in decision support systems at the University of Nantes.
He then wrote a thesis on the collaboration between men and machines in factories. Guillaume was a teacher-researcher at the University of Nantes in order to work while finishing his thesis and preparing for competitive exams.
He then moved to Paris and joined Eurodecision, an IT company specialized in Operational Research. For a year and a half, he worked on building a system to manage the schedules of Air France pilots, which is still in use today.
He then went back to Eurodecision headquarters to work on the redesign of the scheduling tool for bus and tramway vehicles and drivers.
“After working on the driver’s side of public transportation, I discovered the same subject on the passenger’s side at Kisio Digital”. Itineraries, timetables, next trips… Guillaume built the different components for users.
Always looking for new challenges, he was drawn to Kardinal’s project where “everything had yet to be built while being free to innovate and test new technologies”.
A cross-functional role, with a strong emphasis on innovation
Along with Frédéric, Guillaume is part of the Operational Research (OR) team, which developed Kardinal’s optimization solver. In addition to being a developer in Research and Development, he manages his team of 3 developers. Each involved in programming and designing the powerful algorithms behind Kardinal’s solution, which allow for the calculation of the best possible route optimization, taking into account the objectives and constraints of the client. “Understanding the needs of users and potentially those they have not yet identified is a challenge I like to tackle every day”. Guillaume likes to explore the reasons for bottlenecks and find solutions.
As an active contributor, he puts a lot of effort into his role as Product Owner for Operational Research, which leads him to explore ways to improve Kardinal’s products. “I like to create something that is useful in the field but that is also flexible and scalable over time”.
Guillaume is proud to have succeeded in making the calculation engines powerful enough not to be impacted with every evolution. Since Kardinal’s solution works continuously and never stops optimizing, it adapts to new data provided by the customer to suggest the best optimizations at any given time.
Always looking to learn new things and share it with others
Guillaume is continuously improving his skills, especially in the last 6 months when he learned Machine Learning techniques applied to Operational Research that he has applied to the Kardinal solution.
By staying up-to-date, Guillaume has learned RUST, a computer language that he has implemented at Kardinal. This was extremely beneficial as it helped to make the solution’s algorithms even more powerful. Usually, C++ is the most used computer language in Operations Research. It is a very powerful and efficient language, yet it generates a lot of errors. “RUST has the advantage of being as fast as C++ while avoiding many bugs, which makes the solution even more reliable“. Constantly looking to improve performance, Guillaume is always eager to look for new ways to make algorithms even faster and more efficient.
For this reason, he appreciates the freedom provided by Kardinal to skip any morning meetings so he can focus on his work and research. Thankful that his work is visible to his colleagues, he feels that his opinion is valued and taken into account within the company. As a result of his two years as a teacher, Guillaume enjoys sharing his knowledge with others. He occasionally contributes to open source projects related to his skills. “Rather than reinventing existing techniques and wasting time, it is more interesting to share our knowledge in order to improve these techniques“. Among other things, he has developed a widely used Rust library, StructOpt.
Thanks to his 3D printer, Guillaume has created a custom keyboard, optimized and ergonomic, consisting of two separate parts. He provides all the necessary tools in open source for everyone to copy and modify it.
At Kardinal, we are happy and proud to have Guillaume on our team!
