Scientific Coordinators of the TRACES Project

  • French scientific coordinator: Jérôme Gensel
    Jérôme Gensel is a full-professor in Computer Science since 2007 at the Université Grenoble Alpes (UGA). He is a member of the LIG (Grenoble Computer Science Laboratory), where he led the Steamer research team from 2010 to 2014 (about twenty members then).  With an extensive research experience in artificial intelligence, knowledge representation and constraint programming, he conducts research on spatial and temporal information systems and in geomatics (or geographic information science). His research is mainly applied to the fields of land use planning and natural hazard prevention. He has supervised 16 doctoral theses. Three of his most recent theses are related to the proposed project. He has been the coordinator of a dozen European and international research projects, notably in the framework of the European Commission’s ESPON programme, dedicated to spatial planning and environment themes. He was director of the CNRS MAGIS French national research group on spatial information and geomatics from 2013 to 2016.
  • Swiss scientific coordinator: Hy Dao
     Hy Dao is Adjunct Professor at the University of Geneva and Head of Unit at UNEP/GRID-Geneva. He holds a post-graduate diploma from the International Institute for Aerospace Surveys and Earth Sciences (ITC, Enschede, The Netherlands) and a PhD in human geography from the University of Geneva. He was leader and expert in several EU and Swiss funded projects on data and indicators of territorial cohesion and environmental situation. He led several studies on Planetary Boundaries at the Swiss, European and global levels. He contributed to the risk analysis in the UNISDR Global Assessment Report series. He recently was responsible of the University of Geneva team in the H2020 PLACARD project – PLAtform for Climate Adaptation and Risk reduction.

Institutions and Other Members of the TRACES Project

4 research teams are involved in the TRACES Project. The partners form a multidisciplinary consortium of researchers confirmed in Computer Science in the three fields of AI addressed (Knowledge Representation, Machine Learning, Multi-Agent System), and in geography and geomatics, in the processing of geographical information, particularly in the production and management of statistical and environmental data. The consortium brings together a great deal of expertise in various technologies (semantic web, machine learning, multi-agent systems, environmental databases, use and analysis of satellite images, etc.) which will be used to build the proposed processing chain. Some of these researchers have already worked together in national or European projects or for PhD supervision on related subjects, but all of them are gathered for the first time around this ambitious project. The partners have to their credit numerous robust and widely used IT projects. Although mainly made up of computer scientists, the consortium has a good knowledge of environmental issues and practices or policies at different territorial levels (municipalities, metropolitan areas, cantons, departments, State, Europe). Finally, the geographical proximity of the partners appears to be an asset, and motivates in particular the choice of environmental trajectories allowing comparative analysis to be carried out on the border regions between France and Switzerland.

  • Université Grenoble Alpes (UGA) – Grenoble Computer Science Laboratory (LIG) / STeamer. STeamer* is a research group in Computer Science which leads research in Geographic Information Science, focusing on the spatial and temporal dimensions of data. Research studies of STeamer focus on collecting, modelling, querying, reasoning and visualizing spatial and temporal data, in particular using Semantic Web languages and technologies. STeamer has led or been involved in many funded scientific projects at the national, European and international levels.
    Members of UGA/LIG/STeamer involved in the TRACES Project:
    • Marlène Villanova-Oliver is an Assistant Professor in Computer Science at UGA. She’s the leader of the STeamer research group. Her research interests and skills concern spatiotemporal information modelling, visualization and reasoning.
    • Camille Bernard is an Assistant Professor in Computer Science at UGA. Her PhD Thesis defended in 2019 dealt with the evolution of administrative divisions and their immersion in the semantic Web using KGs.
    • Paule-Annick Davoine is a Full-Professor in Geography at UGA. She graduated in Computer Science and geographical information sciences. Her research interests and competencies are in spatiotemporal visualization, dynamic cartography and interfaces.
    • Philippe Genoud is an Assistant Professor in Computer Science at UGA. His research interests and skills are in the Semantic Web, programming tools and technologies.
    • Danielle Ziébelin is a Full-Professor in Computer Science at UGA. Her research interests and expertise are in AI fields of knowledge representation and reasoning.
    • Daniela Milon Florès is a PhD student under the supervision of Pr. Jérôme Gensel, Dr. Gregory Giuliani, and Dr. Camille Bernard. Her PhD topic deals with the coupling of Web Semantic and Machine Learning approachees for the modeling and analysis of Semantic Environmental Trajectories of Territories
    • Arthur Louis is working on the TRACES project first as a intership student and then as an engineer in charge of developping the TRACES-viz prototype
  • University of Geneva (Unige) – Centre Universitaire d’Informatique (CUI) is an interfaculty center for research and teaching in Computer Science, Information Systems and Informatics Linguistics. As relevant for TRACES, CUI develops state of the art scientific knowledge in ontologies, context-aware systems, machine learning, and agent-based systems. Established in 1976, CUI has a long experience of competitive research projects funded by various research agencies (among others SNF, H2020, COST, Innosuisse, etc.).
    Members of Unige/CUI involved in the TRACES Project:
  • University of Geneva (Unige) – Institute for Environmental Sciences (ISE) is an inter-faculty entity of the University of Geneva that undertakes research and teaching activities in the numerous inter-connected domains of the environment, such as climate, water, biodiversity, health, energy, urban ecology, environmental governance and territorial development. ISE is specialized in performing spatially-explicit modelling, by handling and analysing spatial and statistical data on environmental and natural resource issues through Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and remotely-sensed imagery. The team also specialized in down-scaling and upscaling of environmental data and indicators, and in developing geocomputation workflows with distributed computing infrastructures linked to spatial data infrastructures, using international (meta)data standards (e.g., ISO, OGC) and initiatives (e.g., GEOSS, INSPIRE). Capacity building on Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDI), Open Data Cube (ODC) and GEOSS- related issues is also a key asset of the team.
    Members of Unige/ISE involved in the TRACES Project:
    • Gregory Giuliani, a Senior Lecturer at the University of Geneva, is a geologist and environmental scientist who specializes in Geographical Information Systems analysis and Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDI). He also works at GRID-Geneva of the United Nations Environment Programme since 2001, where he was previously the focal point for SDI. He is currently the Head of the Digital Earth Unit and Swiss Data Cube project leader. His research focuses on Land Change Science and how Earth observations can be used to monitor and assess environmental changes and support sustainable development.
    • Denisa Rodila is a Scientific Collaborator in the Swiss Data Cube project and works on algorithms regarding integration of satellite and non-satellite sources, and on management of large-scale data sets. She is involved in the parallelization and performance improvement of the Swiss Data Cube project, while making use of High-Performance Computing technologies.
    • Bruno Chatenoux is a civil-engineer and geologist specialized in GIS in environmental sciences. He has been involved in various projects and also worked as a consultant for the Small Arms Survey (SHBA project), and as a GIS advisor for the French Red Cross. He is currently the Data Analyst of the Swiss Data Cube (http://www.swissdatacube.ch)
  • Université de Bourgogne (UB) – Burgundy Computer Science Laboratory (LIB) is a research laboratory developing and structuring research on three major topics: Geometric Modelling, Combinatorics and networks, Data Science. This partner institution, made up of members of the Data Science research team, brings its experience in knowledge modelling, knowledge enrichment, knowledge evolution, spatiotemporal and trajectories modelling, dynamics ontologies, large-scale data storage solution.
    Members of UB/LIB involved in the TRACES Project:
    • Christophe Cruz is a Full-Professor in Computer Science. His research interests are knowledge modelling, knowledge enrichment and spatiotemporal trajectory modelling. He developed expertise and research projects on agent knowledge modelling and spatiotemporal trajectory insight.
    • Hocine Cherifi is a Full-Professor in Computer Science.  His primary work and research interests are in the areas of Hypergraph and Network Science.
    • Eric Leclerq is an Associate Professor in Computer Science. His research work concerns the definition of models to link data, knowledge and analysis tools, and multi-paradigm models and polyglot storage system (or polystore) to deal with the variability of large-scale data.
    • Muhammad Arslan is working as a Research Engineer at the Laboratoire d’Informatique de Bourgogne (LIB) of University of Bourgogne with the collaboration of the French company FirstECO under the project of France Relance. His works are mainly centered on semantic enrichment of trajectories for safety applications, and knowledge modeling along with text processing methods to improve business text classifications.
    • Samir Jabbar is working in the TRACES projects as an AI engineer and is in charge of developping an AI chain of agents to build environnemental ontologies.

*STeamer LIG’s research group became the stories LIG”s research group in January 2025