Albert Villanova
Machine Learning Engineer at Hugging Face
Paris, Ile-de-France
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolAlbert Villanova is a Machine Learning Engineer and founder with 11 years of experience building production ML systems and leading data science teams, currently at Hugging Face and running AI consultancy Aiinnova. He combines a rare trio of scientific rigor (PhD in theoretical particle physics), software engineering (BSc Computer Science), and Agile management to translate Big Data into business impact. His open-source contributions span flagship projects like fastai, transformers and datasets, where he’s improved data pipelines, documentation and CI reliability for widely used ML tooling. Past roles include managing teams of 20 data scientists on industrial and research projects and delivering low-latency trading and sensor-based solutions. He is comfortable across research, backend engineering and technical writing, and has a track record of making hard engineering details—dependency fixes, file-format support and robust examples—work reliably for the community. Based in Paris, he blends academic depth with practical product delivery and entrepreneurial drive.
11 years of coding experience
15 years of employment as a software developer
BSc Computer Science, BSc Computer Science at SUPINFOExecutive Certificate Data Science: Data to Insights, Executive Certificate Data Science: Data to Insights at MIT Professional EducationPhD Theoretical Particle Physics, PhD Theoretical Particle Physics at University of Valencia
Spanish, French, English, Catalan, Portuguese
Stackoverflow
86reputation
11kreached
2answers
1question
Github Skills (56)
data-analysis10
transformers10
dependency-management10
notebook10
pytorch10
learn-ruby-on-rails10
python10
evaluation10
data-science10
data-set10
scikit10
testing10
data-engineering10
user-manual10
machine-learning10
Programming languages (14)
Github contributions (5)
huggingface/smolagents
Jan 2025 - Apr 2025
🤗 smolagents: a barebones library for agents that think in python code.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:10 releases, 340 reviews, 359 PRs in 2 months
Contributions summary:Albert primarily contributed to example and core code for the `smolagents` library, focused on agents that think in python code. They implemented changes to the benchmark example, including aligning data types and refactoring the dataset. The user also made core library changes involving dependencies, such as making the OpenAI dependency optional, removing a dependency, and fixing an arg.
huggingface/datasets
Nov 2020 - Jan 2023
🤗 The largest hub of ready-to-use datasets for ML models with fast, easy-to-use and efficient data manipulation tools
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:19 releases, 1023 reviews, 555 commits in 2 years 2 months
Contributions summary:Albert's contributions primarily involve modifying existing code related to data loading and dataset handling. They made substantial changes to code within several dataset modules by updating URLs, fixing file parsing issues, and incorporating support for various file formats (e.g. .ndjson). Their work improved the datasets library by correcting parsing errors, ensuring compatibility with different file types, and streamlining the data loading process for various datasets.
ml-modelstensorflownatural-language-processingmanipulationdata-science
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