Laurent Ach is the manager of Rakuten Institute of Technology Paris, focusing on Human-Computer Interaction, Computer Vision, and Data Science. He is an engineer graduated from Ecole Centrale de Lyon in 1990 and started his career in Thales Group where he worked for ten years on artificial intelligence projects for French National Defense, on computer graphics for virtual prototyping of cars, and on virtual humans for ergonomics studies. He later joined a start-up company developing a 3D streaming technology similar to Google Earth. He was responsible in Safran Group for organizing new collaborative processes in the domain of mobile telephony. Before being manager of RIT Paris, he was the CTO of Cantoche, a company developing avatars and virtual assistants. He has leaded or contributed to several French and European collaborative research projects.