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Victor du Mesnil du Buisson

AI Researcher & Cognitive Systems Architect

Memory, Agency & Collective Intelligence

AI researcher and cognitive systems architect developing frameworks for memory, agency, reasoning and collective intelligence. My work examines how artificial agents can develop through experience, preserve continuity without assuming a fixed self, keep thought separate from authorised action, and coordinate within shared worlds. I turn these questions into deterministic software whose results can be reproduced and audited, drawing on fifteen years building and validating technology ventures — including four years at Citi's venture studio.

Each position is tagged with the threads it evidences. Follow one to see the same career re-sorted around a single problem.

Independent research

Independent Researcher · Relational AI & Cognitive Architecture

2024 – present

(self-directed)

  • ARCANA — Conceived and built a framework for modelling intelligence as relationships and evolving processes rather than isolated objects. The system represents how patterns form, stabilise, change and recur across agents and groups, with every transition reproducible and auditable.
  • Embodied agency — Developed an architecture in which reasoning proposes possibilities but cannot act alone: bodily constraints, resources, care, social rules and explicit authorisation jointly determine what becomes action. Private internal state remains separate from public consequence.
  • Memory & continuity — Developed a model in which memory is carried in how a system changes through experience, not merely retrieved from storage. It separates learned dispositions, exact state recovery, an evolving self-model, identity, public history and present authority—relations often collapsed into a single idea of memory.
  • Reasoning & collective intelligence — Unified perception and reasoning as geometry over relationships: structure defines possible connections, measurement establishes what evidence supports, dynamics shapes candidates and deliberation compares paths. A social layer separately handles causal evidence, cooperation, governance and repair without reading private internal states.
  • Research & implementation — Built a falsification-led programme: questions specified in advance, deterministic validators, machine-readable evidence, retained negative results and explicit limits. Direct AI coding agents across modular Python and optional Rust/CUDA paths, promoting only results that survive replay and reuse.

Professional experience

Entrepreneur-in-Residence · Citi d10x

Jan 2020 – Apr 2024

Venture Studio · Singapore

  • Championed rapid prototyping across the studio, halving product development cycles through a reusable code stack and compliant cloud infrastructure — the difficulty being architecture that satisfies a regulated bank's controls without abandoning iteration speed.
  • Identified and analysed green-field Metaverse and Sustainability opportunities for Citi APAC; formulated the disruptive innovation thesis and advised leadership on where to place strategic bets.
  • Took 7 nascent products through validation with business heads across the organisation, building value propositions against each unit's priorities to secure executive sponsorship.
  • Supported the launch of cross-business products processing millions of USD per quarter, including novel financial instruments and specialised fintech infrastructure.

Founder · Sticheo

Jan 2017 – Jun 2019

Video Streaming AdTech · Singapore

  • Hired and led a team of 4 engineers from IIT Delhi on a neural network research project: soft semantic segmentation of video, restructuring cloud training to cut costs by 90%.
  • Invented and built the underlying technology — custom streaming servers integrating programmatically targeted product placements directly into video streams.
  • Secured alpha deployments with 4 enterprise clients and synthesised their feedback into the product roadmap.

Start-up Consultant · Independent

Jan 2017 – Dec 2019

Singapore

  • Advised seven pre-seed and seed-stage startups on positioning, product roadmaps and investor narrative; two secured seed funding. Defined and shipped MVPs on a six-week definition-to-deployment cycle.

Co-founder & Head of Marketing · Epigami

Nov 2013 – Jan 2017

Private Tutor Marketplace · Singapore

  • Grew a two-sided marketplace to 150k monthly organic visits and a pool of 5,000 tutors, outranking hundreds of local competitors; lifted conversion from 3% to 15% through iterative UX research.

Co-founder · e-Cose

Nov 2012 – Dec 2014

e-Commerce Services · Philippines

  • Built the business from plan to breakeven inside the first month; hired and trained the first 10 employees and drove 100% revenue growth over 12 months.

Junior In-House Entrepreneur · Rocket Internet

Oct 2011 – Nov 2012

Venture Builder · Philippines

  • Set up a regional support centre, scaling it to 200 staff and USD 80k monthly revenue; led localisation of Zalora Philippines across marketing and operations.

Education

BEng Computer Science · Imperial College London

Jun 2011

United Kingdom

Head of the Engineering Student Union (3,000 students); personal recommendation from the Rector, Sir Keith O'Nions.

Technical

Languages
Python · JavaScript / TypeScript · C++
ML & inference
PyTorch · transformer architectures · LoRA / PEFT · quantisation · local inference (vLLM, llama.cpp) · open-weights models (Qwen, Llama, Mistral)
Cloud & infrastructure
AWS — Certified Solutions Architect, Associate (LKYB76NC0JBQQ8KQ) · Azure · GCP
Practice
System specification and decomposition · agent-directed development · rapid prototyping · research workflow design

Practice & fieldwork

2024 – 2026

  • A year at a Shaolin school under Yu Weidong, lineage holder in Xingyiquan, Baguazhang and Taijiquan — Hebei, China
  • Six months training gada at Tulsi Akhara in Varanasi, and Kalaripayattu in Kerala — India
  • Two months of Muay Chaiya — Thailand
  • Vipassana retreats — Sri Lanka and India

Sustained first-person investigation of attention, embodiment and memory — pursued alongside the architecture work rather than apart from it.

Languages

Native
English, French
Conversational
Spanish
Foundations
German, Portuguese, Japanese