Clodéric Mars

AI Engineer & Tech Leader

Montréal, Canada

Summary

I design and build decision-making AIs that balance automation and human oversight. With experience spanning leadership and hands-on engineering, I’ve developed collaborative human-AI systems across creative, industrial, and operational domains, scaled teams and products to enterprise-grade maturity, and transferred advanced research into real-world deployments. I bridge research, engineering, and product to deliver real-world impact.

Key skills

Leadership & Strategy: Program management, Research & development project management, Technical presales & business development, Technology transfer, Recruitment.
Artificial Intelligence: Multi-agent systems, Reinforcement learning (RL), Large Language Models (LLM), Explainable AI, Game AI.
Software Engineering & Infrastructure: Software architecture, Distributed systems, Cloud infrastructure, MLOps, Python, Go, C++, Rust, Javascript, Kubernetes, Kafka, AWS, Azure.
Spatial Computing: Simulation, Computational geometry, Geographic information systems (GIS).
Communication: Public speaking, Technical writing, French (native), English (full professional proficiency).

Experiences

Principal AI/ML Platform Architect - CM Labs Simulations (www.cm-labs.com)

since 2025/04 - Montréal, Canada

Post-acquisition, I took charge of the AI roadmap at CM Labs, both as an architect and program lead.
Design and build AI systems that assist trainees and instructors in real-time, using RL and LLMs.
Set up MLOps practices and infrastructure to support scalable agent development, training, and deployment across products.

VP of Engineering - AI Redefined (AIR - acquired by CM Labs Simulations) (www.ai-r.com)

from 2021/02 to 2025/04 - Montréal, Canada

Scaled AIR from early prototypes to a real business: grew a distributed team of 16+ engineers and researchers, adopted an open-core SaaS approach, and hit ~$1.5M ARR.
Built human-AI collaboration tech using RL, LLMs, and symbolic AI. Shipped real-world deployments, published 9 papers, and filed 3 patents.
Led strategic partnerships across aerospace, energy, and academia (Thales (www.thalesgroup.com), CAE (www.cae.com), RTE (www.rte-france.com), the University of Alberta (www.ualberta.ca), MILA (mila.quebec), ...) and made sure the tech delivered.
Ran technical due diligence during acquisition talks and helped land a successful exit.

Freelance AI engineer - AI Redefined

from 2020/08 to 2021/01 - Paris, France

Starting position at AI Redefined as a freelancer before moving to Canada.

Co-founder & CTO - craft ai (www.craft.ai)

from 2015/03 to 2020/04 - Paris, France

Co-founded craft ai and grew it to 20+ people, raising ~€9M and building a product that brought explainable AI into real-world operations.
Led product and engineering — shipped an AI SaaS for time series forecasting and decision support, used across ~10 B2B projects (incl. EDF (www.edfenergy.com), Total (www.totalenergies.fr)), resulting in significant operational optimizations for end-users.
Turned tech & research into IP and revenue: 5 peer-reviewed papers, strong ARR (~€1M), and deployments that actually moved the needle for customers.
Built and scaled the tech team, managed roadmaps, budgets, and everything in between to get us from concept to commercial traction.

Lead Software Engineer & Product Manager - MASA Group (masasim.com)

from 2012/01 to 2015/02 - Paris, France

Managed a team of ~5 software engineers across Paris and Munich, aligning priorities and resource allocation with company leadership to meet project goals.
Architected and developed an AI agent authoring tool and runtime, featuring behavior tree & spatial reasoning engines. Empowered instructional and game designers to create AI agents for simulations and video games, creating key intellectual property that later became the foundation of craft ai.

R&D Software Engineer - Golaem (acquired by Autodesk) (golaem.com)

from 2010/01 to 2011/12 - Rennes, France

Led the development of the navigation engine for virtual crowds, industrializing research prototypes and algorithms developed at Inria.
Delivered diverse applications of crowd simulation technology, including train car evaluation for SNCF (www.groupe-sncf.com), real-time virtual city population with Dassault Systèmes (www.3ds.com) and crowd simulation for a historical documentary with Mikros (www.technicolor.com/studios/mikros-animation/). These efforts contributed to the leading crowd simulation product for the animation and VFX market.

R&D Software Engineer - Inria (www.inria.fr)

from 2009/02 to 2009/12 - Rennes, France

Starting position at Golaem as a member of the Bunraku (www.irisa.fr/bunraku) team.

Software Engineer - Teamlog (acquired by Open) (www.open.global)

from 2006/07 to 2009/02 - Rennes, France

Developed a toolchain to create virtual cities for Orange (www.orange.fr), resulting in pedestrian-level digital recreation of Paris and Barcelona.
Developed a contribution system for PagesJaunes.fr (www.pagesjaunes.fr), enhancing the platform’s user engagement.

Additional activities

Contributor - The Good AI

from 2020/07 to 2020/12

Contributed written content about responsible AI.

Data Scientist (volunteer) - APHP (www.aphp.fr)

from 2020/05 to 2020/06 - Paris, France

Supported early COVID-19 epidemiological studies by extracting & preparing data.

Skills -

Data science, Python, Apache Spark.

Track chair - nucl.ai

from 2015/01 to 2016/07 - Vienna, Austria

Curated content, managed speakers and presented tracks at a yearly AI developer conference.

Education

MEng (Diplôme d'ingénieur) in Computer Science - INSA de Rennes (www.insa-rennes.fr)

from 2001/09 to 2006/06 - Rennes, France

Engineering program, with a specialization in computer science.

MSc in Artificial Intelligence & Computer Graphics - Université de Rennes 1 (www.univ-rennes.fr)

from 2005/09 to 2006/06 - Rennes, France

Academic curriculum focused on Artificial Intelligence, including machine learning and symbolic reasoning, & Computer Graphics, including virtual reality and animation.

Member of Inria (www.inria.fr)'s Bunraku (www.irisa.fr/bunraku) team, advised by Fabrice Lamarche.

MOOCS

2025/02Coursera & SkillUp EdTech - Program Management: Framework, Strategy, and PlanningProgram Management
2025/02Hugging Face - Agents Course - FoundationsLarge Language Models (LLM), Agents
2020/11Coursera & deeplearning.ai - Build Better Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs)Deep Learning
2020/11Coursera & deeplearning.ai - Build Basic Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs)Deep Learning
2020/06OpenClassrooms & Groupe INSA - Utilisez l'apprentissage par renforcement avec un droneReinforcement Learning
2020/05OpenClassrooms & CentraleSupelec - Réalisez des calculs distribués sur des données massivesData Engineering, Distributed Computing
2011/12Stanford University & ml-class.org - Machine Learning courseMachine Learning

Peer-reviewed publications

Full list on Google Scholar (scholar.google.com/citations?user=fvCC1rwAAAAJ)

2024/06 - AASG workshop (Autonomous Agents for Social Good) at AAMAS, Auckland, New ZealandTowards Human-Steerable Battery Energy Storage System Optimization: A Novel MDP FrameworkSai Krishna Gottipati, Clodéric Mars, Julien Gabaud, Vahid Abdollahi, Laila El Moujthahid, Matthew E. Taylor
2023/11 - I/ITSEC (Interservice/Industry Training, Simulation and Education Conference), Orlando, FloridaImmersive AI assistance during eVTOL multi-agent ATC traffic routingJean-François Delisle, Simon Riendeau, Clodéric Mars, Sagar Kurandwad
2023/05 - AAMAS (International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems), London, UKHiking up that HILL with Cogment-Verse: Train & Operate Multi-agent Systems Learning from HumansSai Krishna Gottipati, Luong-Ha Nguyen, Clodéric Mars, Matthew E. Taylor
2023/05 - ALA (Adaptive and Learning Agent) @ AAMAS (International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems), London, UKWIP: Human-AI interactions in real-world complex environments using a comprehensive reinforcement learning frameworkMd Saiful Islam, Srijita Das, Sai Krishna Gottipati, William Duguay, Clodéric Mars, Jalal Arabneydi, Antoine Fagette, Matthew Guzdial, Matthew E. Taylor
2020/04 - EGC (Extraction et Gestion des Connaissances), Brussel, BelgiumThe three stages of Explainable AI: How explainability facilitates real world deployment of AIClodéric Mars, Rémi Dès, Matthieu Boussard
2017/07 - CNIA (Conférence Nationale sur les Applications Pratiques de l'Intelligence Artificielle), Caen, FrancePeriodic split method: learning more readable decision trees for human activitiesMatthieu Boussard, Clodéric Mars, Rémi Dès, Caroline Chopinaud
2015/06 - Game AI Pro 2Hierarchical Architecture for Group Navigation BehaviorsClodéric Mars, Jérémy Chanut

Talks

2023/10/25Building AI Assistants for Augmenting Human Operators: A Roadmap Towards Creating SuperteamsAI DevWorld, Santa Clara, California
2023/02/15Trustworthy Human-Machine Teaming: The Next Stage of EvolutionREAIM (Responsible AI in the Military Domain), The Hague, Netherlands
2022/03/23Towards Human-AI Teaming: Intelligence Ecosystems to Tackle High-Stakes Use CasesData Council, Austin, Texas
2017/03/09Améliorer l'expérience utilisateur grâce à l'intelligence artificielle"Hello! Business Talks" Humanité(s) Digitale(s), Paris, France
2014/03/17Environmentally Conscious AI: Improving Spatial Analysis and ReasoningGDC (Game Developers Conference) AI Summit, San Francisco, California
2011/06/24Towards Directable Autonomous CrowdsParis Game/AI Conference, Paris, France

Other Publications

2021/06The future of human-AI systems is already here – it’s just not evenly architectedMilitary Embedded Systems
2020/11AI & Biases 101: The bakery caseThe Good AI
2015/06BT 101 – Behavior Trees grammar basicscraft ai's blog