CTO & Co-founder · Neural Factory S.R.L.

Dr. Walid
Iguider

AI researcher and engineer with 12+ years building intelligent systems — from algorithmic fairness and recommender systems to autonomous agents and enterprise LLM platforms. Based in Italy, operating at the frontier of industrial AI.

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01 — About

Building AI that
actually works.

I'm a PhD computer scientist and entrepreneur, currently serving as CTO & Co-founder of Neural Factory — an AI platform company accelerating Italian manufacturing SMEs through intelligent automation and data-driven decision-making.

My doctoral research at the University of Cagliari focused on using Machine Learning to optimize e-coaching platforms — combining recommender systems, fairness algorithms, and dropout prediction. Years before "responsible AI" became a trend.

Before co-founding Neural Factory, I led AI initiatives at FairMind, designed data-driven marketing systems for Stellantis at Stackhouse, and built ML products that helped apps scale to millions of users across Italy, Spain, and Morocco.

12+
Years experience
PhD
Computer Science
4
Languages
1M+
App users impacted

🧠 LLMs & Generative AI

Production-ready LLM systems — RAG pipelines, AI agents, orchestration layers, and guardrails that reduce hallucinations in complex enterprise contexts. Contributed open-source models on HuggingFace.

LLMsRAGAI AgentsGuardrailsHuggingFace

📊 Recommender Systems & Fairness

Published researcher in algorithmic fairness applied to recommendation. First in literature to introduce fairness-of-exposure algorithms for athletic e-coaching platforms.

Collaborative FilteringFairnessUser Modeling

🏭 Industrial AI & Knowledge Graphs

Three-tier AI architecture for manufacturing SMEs: knowledge graphs + conversational analytics + autonomous agents. Real clients, real production deployments.

Knowledge GraphsText2SQLIndustry 4.0

☁️ Cloud & Scalable Systems

Serverless microservices on AWS, CI/CD pipelines, disaster recovery planning, and scalable ML SaaS products deployed across Europe.

AWSServerlessDockerSaaS
02 — Experience

Career journey

Apr 2024 — Present
CTO & Co-founder
Neural Factory S.R.L. — Italy

Leading the technical vision of an AI platform company serving Italian manufacturing SMEs. Designed a three-tier AI system combining knowledge graphs, conversational analytics, and autonomous agents. Strategic partnerships with Alphabridge and Easynet Group.

AI PlatformKnowledge GraphsAgentsManufacturing
Apr 2024 — Sep 2025
Senior AI Engineer
FairMind S.R.L. — Italy

Led R&D of a generative AI platform for software development acceleration. Designed production-ready LLM systems for code generation, built AI agents for complex problem-solving, developed model orchestration layers, and implemented guardrails for security and compliance. Contributed open-source models to HuggingFace including Minerva-3B-Instruct and multilingual adaptations. Provided technical mentoring to junior engineers.

LLMsCode GenerationAI AgentsHuggingFaceGuardrails
Mar 2022 — Feb 2024
Senior Consulting Data Scientist
Stackhouse → Stellantis — Italy / Enlarged Europe

Led design and deployment of data-driven marketing AI for Stellantis across Europe. Built an Audience Classification system, an Accessories Recommendation engine, and a Churn Prediction system — all deployed for multiple Stellantis brands simultaneously.

+20% conversion rate Multi-brand, multi-market
Recommender SystemsClassificationChurn PredictionMarketing AI
Oct 2021 — Apr 2022
Senior Data Scientist
Athlos — Italy

Reporting to CTO. Led design of web applications, recommender systems, and LLM-based digital assistants. In collaboration with Arkys, developed a traceability and optimization solution for the waste management cycle. Deployed multiple Information Retrieval and Recommendation engines in production.

LLMsInformation RetrievalRecommender Systems
Feb 2020 — Oct 2021
Data Scientist
Abinsula → U4FIT — Sardinia, Italy

Led design and development of ML SaaS products for U4FIT, a digital e-coaching platform helping personal trainers guide athletes toward healthier lifestyles.

€211K funding raised 5× workload reduction 100K+ downloads
ML SaaSe-HealthRecommendation
Apr 2019 — Jan 2020
Data Scientist — Fairness & User Modeling
Eurecat — Barcelona, Spain

Worked within Eurecat's e-Health and Big Data Analytics units. Designed and developed Fairness and User Modeling algorithms to enhance personal trainer productivity — this work directly led to the first fairness-of-exposure algorithms for athletic ranking in the literature, later published as part of my doctoral research.

Algorithmic FairnessFairness in RankingsUser Modelinge-Health
Oct 2016 — Dec 2017
Data Scientist
theShukran — Italy

Designed, developed, and deployed user recommendation, face recognition, and sentiment analysis algorithms for the Shukran social network.

500K+ downloads
RecommendationFace RecognitionSentiment Analysis
Sep 2012 — Oct 2016
Software Engineer
Various Companies — Morocco & Italy

Web and mobile development across several companies. Led development of CIH Bank's mobile banking app (1M+ downloads), contributed to Dubai Plus payments platform, worked on PMU Financial Information System, and co-founded a startup helping small businesses digitalize workflows.

1M+ downloads (CIH Bank)
Mobile DevWeb EngineeringFinTech
02b — Education

🎓 PhD — Computer Science

University of Cagliari, Italy · 2018–2021

Using ML to optimize personal trainer workload in e-coaching platforms. Focus: Recommender Systems, Algorithmic Fairness, Dropout Prediction, bias-aware rankings.

📐 Master's — Software Engineering

University of Fez, Morocco · 2012–2014

Software Engineering, Web Engineering, Design Patterns, Data Mining, Databases, Image Processing, Research Operations.

🔢 Bachelor's — Mathematics & CS

University of Rabat, Morocco · 2009–2012

Mathematics & Computer Science — Software Engineering option. Mathematical foundations, Programming, Data Structures, Algorithms.

03 — Research & Projects

Selected work

⚖️

Fairness in Health Recommendation

First in literature to introduce fairness-of-exposure algorithms for athletic e-coaching. Models athlete performance and produces gender-fair urgency rankings for coaches. Validated on a real-world dataset.

PythonScikit-learnAWSFairness
🤖

Minerva-3B-Instruct

Open-source LLM published on HuggingFace — a 3B-parameter instruction-tuned model with multilingual adaptations for enterprise AI and code generation contexts.

LLMsHuggingFaceOpen SourceMultilingual
🔍

Fashion Image Search Engine

Trained a Convolutional Variational Autoencoder (CVAE) on Fashion MNIST to reconstruct fashion images and learn compact latent representations. Leveraged the latent space as a similarity index for visual search — conceptually analogous to semantic search in modern RAG architectures, but applied to image retrieval.

PythonKerasCVAELatent SearchVisual Similarity
💬

Sentiment Analysis Platform

Core NLP engine for theShukran social network (500K+ downloads). Detects language, translates to English, and classifies sentiment using Naive Bayes + SentiWordNet + SenticNet.

PythonNLPMongoDBApache Spark
🏥

Scoliosis Classification

Ensemble Deep Learning model classifying Scoliosis vs healthy subjects from non-invasive Rasterstereography analysis. Built with Keras multi-model fusion architecture.

PythonKerasEnsemble DLMedical AI
🌿

ArganRecogn: Face Recognition using Deep Learning

Image classification using a large-scale dataset with small label noise. Trained a classifier to rank data for annotators — demonstrated state-of-the-art results with a fine-tuned deep CNN.

PythonDeep LearningComputer Vision
04 — Stack & Skills

Tools of the trade

AI / ML

  • Large Language Models
  • RAG Architectures
  • AI Agents & Orchestration
  • Recommender Systems
  • Algorithmic Fairness
  • NLP & Sentiment Analysis
  • Computer Vision
  • Active Machine Learning

Languages & Frameworks

  • Python
  • SQL
  • JavaScript / HTML / CSS
  • LangChain
  • PyTorch / Keras
  • Scikit-learn
  • Flask / FastAPI
  • Standard ML

Cloud & Infra

  • AWS (Lambda, S3, ECS)
  • Serverless Architecture
  • Docker
  • MongoDB / MySQL
  • Apache Spark
  • CI/CD Pipelines
  • Disaster Recovery
  • SaaS Platform Design

Other

  • Technical Leadership
  • Team Mentoring
  • Research & Publishing
  • Open Source
  • Italian 🇮🇹
  • English 🇬🇧
  • French 🇫🇷
  • Arabic 🇲🇦
05 — Contact

Let's
connect.

Whether you're exploring an AI partnership, interested in research collaboration, or looking to discuss manufacturing AI — I'm always open to meaningful conversations.

📧
📍
LocationItaly
💼
CompanyNeural Factory S.R.L.
🎓
EducationPhD — University of Cagliari

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