Marc Torrens, PhD

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE. SCIENCE, BUSINESS, SOCIETY.

Biography

Marc Torrens, PhD, is an Associate Professorat Esade Business School and a tech entrepreneur with more than 25 years of experience building machine-learning products and companies. His work sits at the intersection of AI, digital innovation, and entrepreneurship, with a strong focus on turning scientific ideas into impactful real-world applications.

He co-founded Strands, Inc., where he served as Chief Innovation Officer and Board Member for 14 years, creating large-scale recommender systems, pioneering fintech products, and developing a portfolio of 14 software patents (several later acquired by Apple). Marc has also advised and built AI-driven initiatives in the travel, music, retail, fintech, and healthcare sectors. He currently serves as Board Member and Chair of the AI Committee at Medidedalia.

At Esade, Marc teaches Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and Recommender Systems, and has held multiple leadership roles. He has published more than 25 referred articles in journals and conferences. He holds a M.Sc. in Computer Science (UPC) and a PhD in Artificial Intelligence (EPFL), and is proficient in English, French, Spanish and Catalan.

LINKEDIN
CURRICULUM VITAE in PDF

Extended Biography

Marc Torrens received a MSc degree in Computer Science from the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC), Barcelona, Catalonia, in 1997. He received his PhD in Artificial Intelligence from the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Lausanne, Switzerland, in 2002.

In 1997 he joined the AI Lab of the EPFL as a research assistant and Ph.D. student in the area of Intelligent Agents. In 1999, Prof. Boi Faltings, Dr. Pearl Pu, Dr. Christian Frei and Dr. Marc Torrens launched a start-up company. The aim was to commercialize and further develop the concepts of their research that were applied to the travel industry. From April 2000 to 2001, Marc was serving the company as Chief Technology Officer. In 2001, Iconomic Systems S.A. was successfully taken over by i:FAO A.G., the German technology leader in eProcurement software for the business travel. As of May 2001, he began working for i:FAO’s Future Lab. He was responsible for developing reality, a cutting-edge technology software for supporting corporate travelers. From December 2002 to July 2004, he was also a Postdoc researcher at the Artificial Intelligence Lab of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology.

In 2004, Dr. Francisco J. Martin and Dr. Marc Torrens co-founded Strands, Inc. in Oregon, USA. Strands develops recommendation and personalisation technologies to help people discover new things. Marc served the company as Chief Innovation Officer for 14 years. As CIO, Marc led the innovation and product development teams. Some of the most relevant achievements include one of the early music recommender systems, a patent portfolio of more than 14 patents that were sold to Apple, Inc., and a full fintech product suite deployed to dozens of top worldwide banks. From 2004 to 2007 Marc was serving the company from its headquarters in Corvallis, Oregon, US. In 2007 the company moved its headquarters to Barcelona and he returned to its native city. He has also served as a Board Director at Strands.

He has taught Recommender Systems in the Master in Business Analytics and Data Science at the IE Business School (IE) from 2015 to 2018. He has also been invited by The Valley Digital Business School for several in-company lectures for Accenture and Banco Santander on Big Data and Machine Learning. Marc also organised and taught a full course on FinTech at the Geneva Business School in 2016.

In September 2018 Marc started working as a Senior Lecturer at ESADE in the Department of Operations, Innovation and Data Science. In 2022, Marc was appointed Associate Professor, and has been taking different responsibilities ranging from department director, and academic director of different programs in the school.

Since 2023, Marc has been deeply involved in a new startup that applies artificial intelligence to increase clinical safety. He has been serving as a board member and chair of the AI committee for Medidedadlia.com since its foundation.

He is member of the American Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, the Association for Computer Machinery (ACM), and the Catalan Association for Artificial Intelligence. Marc has published more than 20 referred papers on his work in international conferences and journals on Artificial Intelligence and Usability. He is also the inventor of several software patents. Marc co-chaired the Fourth ACM Conference on Recommender Systems in Barcelona.

He is actively involved in technology and science outreach activities (see the book “Inteligencia Artificial: el camino hacia la super inteligencia” published by National Geographic in 2017).

He is proficient in Catalan, Spanish, English and French.

Education

Academic Certificates

Volunteering

  • I am Member of Fiquifund, an NGO with the mission to support young, vulnerable geeks in Barcelona. We sponsor and mentor youngsters with an interest in STEM topics in coordination with local NGOs.
  • In 1991, I declared myself as a conscientious objector to the military service in Spain due to my pacifist convictions. At that time, the only legal alternative was to enroll in a social service activity. I enrolled in a program to help Bosnian refugees from the Balkan war in Croatia. This initiative was described in a book for which I wrote a chapter and it also generated media press releases.