François Chollet
Co-Founder at Ndea
United States
Summary
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RockstarFrançois Chollet is a machine learning engineer and entrepreneur with 11 years of experience building and maintaining core deep learning infrastructure, now co-founding Ndea and ARC Prize. He spent nearly a decade at Google driving Keras and TensorFlow integration, model implementations, documentation, and tooling—work that helped shape widely used projects like Keras, TensorFlow Probability, and popular model zoos (ResNet, Inception, Xception). François combines research-grade understanding of probabilistic modeling and dimensionality reduction with hands-on engineering: refactoring Stable Diffusion in TensorFlow, adding Keras 3 support to libraries like ParametricUMAP, and building hyperparameter tuning primitives. He’s known for improving code quality and testability across large open-source repos, and for translating ML concepts into clear educational notebooks and docs tied to his "Deep Learning with Python" materials. Less obvious: he often focuses on maintainability and API hygiene—removing deprecated APIs, standardizing tests, and making components backend-agnostic—which amplifies long-term impact across the ML ecosystem.
11 years of coding experience
9 years of employment as a software developer
Github Skills (43)
convolutional-neural-networks10
probabilistic-programming10
pytest10
python10
dimensionality-reduction10
imap10
image-processing10
image-classification10
testing10
machine-learning10
stable-diffusion10
recurrent-neural-networks10
numpy10
hyperparameter-optimization10
keras10
Programming languages (9)
Github contributions (5)
keras-team/keras-io
May 2020 - Jan 2023
Keras documentation, hosted live at keras.io
Role in this project:
Software Engineer
Software EngineerContributions:2139 reviews, 569 commits, 973 PRs in 2 years 9 months
Contributions summary:François contributed to the Keras documentation by implementing small fixes and creating and adding various example files, including those for ConvLSTM, image classification and for the Denoising Diffusion Implicit Model. The user also added files for code examples, and added documentation for the layers.
keras
keras-team/keras-preprocessing
May 2018 - Feb 2022
Utilities for working with image data, text data, and sequence data.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:6 releases, 1 review, 42 commits in 3 years 9 months
Contributions summary:François primarily focused on the development and maintenance of the Keras preprocessing library. They implemented and refined image processing functionalities, including image data augmentation, and added features such as directory iteration. Their contributions involved fixing code style issues, adding testing modules for core features, and improving overall code maintainability and error handling within the library. This included ensuring compatibility with different Keras backends.
text-datasequencepythonimage-data
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