Joaquin Quiñonero Candela

Appearances

2007 to 2025 · Newest first within each section · Talks and conversations · Teaching · Profiles and reporting

Talks, panels and podcast conversations where I did the talking; the courses and lectures I taught; and a short list of reporting by others. Each entry says what kind of recording exists. Where the only trace is a program listing, it says that too. A shorter selection is on the front page.

Talks and conversations

Human questions, responsibility and institutions

  1. Careers at the Frontier: Hiring the Future at OpenAI

    OpenAI Forum · interview and audience questions

    Video and transcript · about 60 minutes

    Unconventional career paths, culture, and recruiting during rapid growth, including my own moves through Preparedness and hands-on work.

  2. Building the Future of Responsible AI

    Women in Big Data and LinkedIn, Responsible AI at Scale · panel with Grace Tang, Hema Raghavan and Sakshi Jain

    Event page · no recording

    Standards, transparency, bias, safety, and career advice for people entering the field.

  3. AI Assurance

    AI Native Summit, Zetta Venture Partners, at the Computer History Museum · panel with Chloé Bakalar, Shreya Rajpal and Yaron Singer, moderated by Nick Elprin

    Video · 40 minutes · program

    How independent evaluation, governance and assurance can make deployed AI systems trustworthy.

  4. Alignment and safety panel

    BayLearn 2024, hosted at Apple · with Jascha Sohl-Dickstein and Stuart Russell, moderated by Nilou Salehi

    Event page · no recording

    A practitioner and research panel on alignment and safety.

  5. Information Integrity and AI: Combatting Deepfakes and Disinformation

    NVIDIA GTC · panel

    Video · about 55 minutes

    Policy, resilience, platform responsibility, and the opportunities and risks generative AI creates for information integrity.

  6. Practical AI Fairness: Math, Ethics & Politics

    International AI Cooperation and Governance Forum, HKUST and Tsinghua · fireside conversation with Chloé Bakalar

    Video · 41 minutes · program (PDF)

    Why fairness is not a single metric: mathematical tradeoffs, ethical judgment, politics, and what deployment actually looks like.

  7. Transforming Together: Building a Blueprint for Change

    Partnership on AI Partner Forum, San Francisco · panel, after opening the forum with Rebecca Finlay

    Agenda · 45 minutes · no public recording

    Multistakeholder approaches to socio-technical problems, consensus, and accountable institutional change.

  8. Can We Meet Business Goals and Attain Responsible AI?

    In AI We Trust? · podcast interview

    Audio · 44 minutes

    Ethics by design, organizational diversity, communicating about AI, and why responsibility and business outcomes are compatible.

  9. From Optimism to Doubt (and Back) at Facebook

    In Reality · podcast interview with Eric Schurenberg and Joan Donovan

    Audio

    Scaling Facebook AI, confronting platform harms, and building Responsible AI from inside the institution.

  10. Opening keynote, Pioneer Centre for AI

    University of Copenhagen · keynote at the launch of Denmark's national AI center

    Announcement · no recording

    Trustworthy, human-centered AI and the need for participatory governance.

  11. Finding Solutions: Choice, Control, and Content Policies

    Belfer Center, Harvard Kennedy School · in conversation with Karen Hao, with audience questions

    Video · 60 minutes · watch on YouTube

    Recommendation systems, platform harms, user choice, and the institutional limits of content-policy interventions.

  12. Responsible AI: A Perspective from the Trenches

    MIT Media Lab Perspectives · fireside with Andrew Lippman

    Video · 60 minutes

    Lessons and difficult ethical tradeoffs from fifteen years building and deploying AI at Microsoft and Facebook.

  13. Building Effective and Socially Responsible Artificial Intelligence

    Marconi Society, Decade of Digital Inclusion · panel with Marian Croak, Gillian Hadfield, Stuart Russell and Mark Gorenberg

    Event page · program · recording not clearly linked

    The pressing social questions created by pervasive AI.

  14. Responsible AI Is Primarily a Human Question

    HKUST Centre for Artificial Intelligence Research · virtual fireside with Pascale Fung

    Video

    My technical and personal trajectory as a way into what responsible deployment means for human work, life, risk and dignity.

  15. Building Responsible ML Solutions in Social Media

    O'Reilly AI Superstream: Responsible AI · conversation with Rumman Chowdhury

    Video · O'Reilly subscription may be required

    Concrete methods and organizational choices for responsible machine learning in high-scale social products.

  16. AI Fairness in Practice

    ICLR 2021 Responsible AI workshop · invited talk with Isabel Kloumann and Chloé Bakalar

    Video · 30 minutes · workshop schedule

    Fairness as an interdisciplinary process rather than one metric, grounded in tools and cases from production systems.

  17. Responsible AI at Facebook

    Towards Data Science · podcast interview

    Audio and transcript · about 50 minutes

    Operationalizing fairness, incompatible definitions, algorithmic discrimination, and institutional governance.

  18. Definitions of Fairness

    Gradient Dissent · podcast interview with Jeremie Harris

    Video and audio · 79 minutes · Apple Podcasts

    A long-form bridge from production machine learning to the moral and technical conflicts inside algorithmic fairness.

  19. Facebook, la justicia algorítmica y la inteligencia artificial

    II Congreso Internacional de Inteligencia Artificial, Alicante · opening keynote, in Spanish

    Conference archive with video

    Algorithmic fairness, content systems, and the opportunities and social risks of deployed AI.

  20. Fairness and Ethics in Data Science

    ACM-IMS Interdisciplinary Summit on the Foundations of Data Science · panel with Alexandra Chouldechova, Andrew Gelman and Kristian Lum

    Program (PDF) · 40 minutes · no recording

    Statistical, social and policy perspectives on fairness.

  21. Inclusive AI and fairness at F8

    Facebook F8, day 2 keynote · segment

    Video, embedded in Meta's F8 recap

    Inclusive product design, fairness, and tools for testing AI systems across demographic groups.

  22. Fairness and Artificial Intelligence

    Partnership on AI All Partners Meeting, London · dinner conversation with Annette Zimmermann

    Talk listing · no recording

    A philosopher and a practitioner on competing notions of fairness and institutional judgment.

Building AI systems at scale

  1. A fireside chat on the deployment of AI tools

    Marketplace Innovation Workshop · plenary fireside with Nicolas Stier-Moses

    Program (PDF) · 45 minutes · no recording

    Responsible AI in labor marketplaces and the organizational realities of deploying AI tools.

  2. AI and Machine Learning: A Perspective from Facebook

    Berkeley Center for Law & Technology, Privacy Law Forum · keynote

    Agenda · 30 minutes · no recording

    The power, privacy risks and ethical obligations of large-scale AI, delivered the week the Cambridge Analytica story broke.

  3. Getting a Start in ML and Applied AI at Facebook

    Talking Machines · podcast interview

    Audio

    AI versus data science, building an applied research career, and how Facebook moved models into products.

  4. Designing AI at Scale to Power Everyday Life

    Machine Learning @Scale · conference talk, also given as an invited industry talk at AAAI-17

    Video · 30 minutes · recap

    The organizational and technical systems needed to make AI routine across products rather than the province of specialist teams.

  5. F8 keynote

    Facebook F8 · keynote segment

    Video

    Searchable and intelligent video, and the shared AI backbone supporting production applications.

  6. Facebook Applied Machine Learning Q&A

    Quora Writing Session · twenty-six written answers

    Article · Chinese translation at InfoQ; the original Quora page is no longer indexed

    Production machine learning, research versus engineering, teams, career development, and work habits.

  7. Machine Learning and the Facebook Ads Auction

    ACM EC and NBER joint session · invited talk

    Abstract (PDF) · no recording

    Auction prediction, feedback loops, and large-scale machine learning in advertising markets.

  8. How Machine Learning Is Central to Facebook

    Hamilton Institute, Maynooth · research seminar

    Seminar flyer (PDF) · 60 minutes

    An early account of how ranking and prediction became core product infrastructure at Facebook.

Earlier technical work

  1. Microsoft Research: papel de la investigación en un gigante informático

    University of Granada, CITIC inauguration · public lecture, in Spanish

    Listing · no recording

    How industrial research produces scientific and product impact inside a large technology company.

  2. The Path of Go

    Microsoft Research · short research video

    Video · 2 minutes

    A very short look at machine learning and the challenge of computer Go. Historical rather than substantive.

  3. AdPredictor: Large Scale Bayesian Click-Through Rate Prediction in Bing

    NeurIPS 2010 workshop on machine learning in online advertising · invited talk with Thore Graepel, followed by a panel

    Slides (PDF) · 30 minutes · schedule

    A production Bayesian model for online advertising, then a broader research and industry panel.

  4. F#: Use at Microsoft Research

    Microsoft Research · group interview and demo

    Video · 20 minutes

    How researchers used F# for probabilistic modeling, experimentation, and production-oriented research.

  5. Probabilistic Machine Learning in Computational Advertising

    NeurIPS 2009 workshop · invited talk

    Workshop book (PDF) · no recording

    Bayesian prediction and uncertainty in large-scale computational advertising.

  6. Sensible Priors from Finite Linear Models

    Cambridge Machine Learning Reading Group · with Ed Snelson

    Talk listing · no recording

    How finite basis-function models can induce interpretable priors for Gaussian-process approximations.

  7. GP-LVMs

    Cambridge Machine Learning Reading Group

    Talk listing · no recording

    Gaussian-process latent-variable models for nonlinear dimensionality reduction.

Teaching

Courses and lectures, which ask for a different skill than a conference talk: making hard ideas legible over several hours, and helping other people get good at them.

  1. Transatlantic AI student-project panel

    German International School of Silicon Valley · judging and mentoring high-school teams applying AI to real problems

    School recap · no recording

  2. AI in Real Life

    Stanford ICME, CME 500 seminar · conversation with Esteban Arcaute

    Video · 60 minutes · Stanford series page

    What operating real AI products teaches that benchmark and laboratory work do not.

  3. Understanding the Evidence

    Gaussian Process Summer School, University of Sheffield · technical lecture

    Program · 60 minutes

    A foundational lecture on Bayesian model evidence for an advanced machine-learning summer school.

  4. Examples of Machine Learning and Data Science at Facebook

    Gaussian Process Summer School, University of Sheffield · industry lecture

    Program · 60 minutes

    Early production examples of how machine learning and data science were being used across Facebook.

  5. An Introduction to Probabilistic Machine Learning

    Microsoft Research · technical lecture summarizing a sixteen-hour course

    Video

    Gaussian processes, graphical models, LDA, TrueSkill, and probabilistic reasoning in one substantial teaching session.

  6. 4F13 Machine Learning

    University of Cambridge · fourteen-lecture course, co-taught with Carl Edward Rasmussen

    Course archive: notes, slides and coursework · about 16 hours of lectures

    A graduate course spanning supervised and unsupervised probabilistic machine learning.

  7. Halo, Kinect, Bing: The Magic of Research in Microsoft Products

    Microsoft Research PhD Summer School · lecture

    Program · no recording

    TrueSkill, geometry, and large-scale machine learning as examples of research crossing into widely used products.

  8. Probability and Bayesian Inference

    Machine Learning Summer School · course lecture

    Video · 90 minutes

    An introduction to probability, Bayesian reasoning, and uncertainty for machine-learning students.

  9. The EM Algorithm and Mixtures of Gaussians

    Machine Learning Summer School · course lecture

    Video · 90 minutes

    A full derivation and practical explanation of expectation-maximization and Gaussian mixture models.

Profiles and reporting

Pieces written by others, kept short on purpose. The critical ones are here too.

  1. “Unprecedented pressure to grow”

    CNBC · interview and profile

    Article

    The organizational demands, hiring bar, and human constraints behind OpenAI's rapid expansion.

  2. How Facebook Got Addicted to Spreading Misinformation

    MIT Technology Review · investigative profile by Karen Hao, from extensive interviews

    Article

    A critical account of production incentives, the creation of Responsible AI, and the limits of internal reform.

  3. “Los ingenieros no están preparados para resolver cuestiones éticas”

    El País · interview, in Spanish

    Article · may be metered

    Why ethics cannot be delegated to engineers alone, and how an interdisciplinary Responsible AI team was built.

  4. “Künstliche Intelligenz ist ein sehr mächtiges Werkzeug”

    Deutschlandfunk · radio interview, in German

    Audio and transcript · 11 minutes

    AI-assisted content moderation, the limits of automation, and the arms race against harmful content.

  5. “La inteligencia artificial nos ha ayudado a detectar los contenidos que incitaban al odio”

    El Independiente · interview, in Spanish

    Article

    Career, hate-speech detection, moderation at scale, and the limits of fairness technology.

  6. People of ACM: Joaquin Candela

    Association for Computing Machinery · interview

    Article

    Career arc, production machine learning, research-to-product work, and growing attention to ethical AI.

  7. Inside Facebook's AI Workshop

    Harvard Business Review · interview with Scott Berinato

    Article · may be metered

    Why “wizards don't scale,” and how platforms, tools and organizational design put production AI in everyone's hands.

  8. Inside Facebook's AI Machine

    WIRED · profile from extensive interviews

    Article · may be metered

    The creation of Applied Machine Learning and the strategy for putting machine learning into every Facebook product.

  9. Artificial Intelligence 2017 Trends: interview

    Zenith · report interview

    Report (PDF)

    Facebook's AI roadmap across vision, speech, language, connectivity and VR, framed for business and media audiences.

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