Bénédicte LE GRAND

(French version)

I am Associate Professor et the Université Pierre et Marie Curie. I am doing some research at the Laboratoire d'Informatique de Paris 6 (LIP6), in the Complex Networks Team.

Link to the Complex Networks team’s page

Research Activities

Communities (of users or machines) in spontaneous networks – New research direction

· Identify communities’ needs in terms of services.

· Adaptation of network architecture and mechanisms to support communities.

· Study incentive mechanisms to stimulate users’ participation ; take into account behaviors and sociological criteria.

· Identify implicit communities.

· Application to spontaneous networks (e.g. ad hoc or P2P networks).

Projects : RNRT Airnet, IST WIP, IST NoE Content.

Co-direction of a PhD on communities in spontaneous networks

Semantic Web - Knowledge Management – User profiles

· Contribution to semantic annotation standards, allowing to exploit data more efficiently (e.g. to provide more relevant information retrieval results). This research direction consists in describing resources (without modifying them) with semantic annotation or metadata. The Semantic Web initiative, conducted by Tim Berners-Lee, W3C, aims at promoting such standards at various expressiveness levels.
In this context, I work on RDF and Topic Map standards. I am also interested in the information and inference capabilities provided by ontologies. All these standars make data integration easier, whatever their format or model is. The goal of my research is to ease the –partial- automation of the semantic annotation process, through concepts and relationships extraction techniques.

· Work on ontologies management and evolution.

· Definition of users profiles based on the analysis of Web navigation traces.

Contribution to the specification of XML Topic Maps (XTM), allowing to build a semantic graph above data.

Project: IST craft HiTouch (semantic search engine, dedicated to tourism).

Independant expert for the European, for projects’ evaluation (FP6).

Publications in several book chapters (cf. publications).

Introduction to metadata and to Semantic Web applications.

Data Analysis and Visualization

· Utilization of data analysis techniques, in particular conceptual analysis and Galois lattices construction, for data interpretation and for identification of implicit semantics.

· Definition and application of conceptual contexts for information retrieval.

· Work on complex data visualization and navigation. Definition of representation and navigation metaphors in order to propose intuitive information retrieval in knowledge bases. These representations should allow a transparent navigation both at resource and at semantics levels.

PhD thesis: "Extraction d'information et visualisation de systèmes complexes sémantiquement structurés".

Introduction to Virtual Reality

Co-organization of several workshops (Knowledge Visualization and Extraction at EGC 2005 and EGC 2006 conferences)

Project: RNTL Eiffel

Publications in conferences, reviews and book chapters (cf. publications).

Teaching Activities

Since 2002 Associate Professor in Computer Sciences at l’Université Pierre et Marie Curie (Paris 6).

Introduction to computer networks - L3

Responsible of the New Generation Internet module - M1

Computer networks architecture - M1

Advanced computer networks

2005 « Semantic Web : Standards and Applications » tutorial at STMicroelectronics, Geneva.