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SUMMARY:Honorary Lecture - Prof. François Golay
DTSTART:20230228T180000
DTEND:20230228T194500
DTSTAMP:20260916T062912Z
UID:50fc3b150e399a9a10fe7ec0035437bf268714c273960e7f917f5c06
CATEGORIES:Inaugural lectures - Honorary Lecture
DESCRIPTION:Prof. François Golay\nDate: 28 February 2023\nTime: 18:00 –
  19:45\nIntroductions by the Dean\, lectures by Prof. François Golay and 
 Prof. Bertrand Merminod. Followed by an Apero.\nPlace: Rolex Learning Cent
 er\nZoom link\n\nTitle:\n“Desperately seeking the Digital Twins”\n\nAb
 stract\nWith the increasing availability of data sets of all kinds and sou
 rces\, Digital Twins are emerging as powerful tools in many domains of sci
 ence and engineering. The metaphor is particularly attractive for our urba
 n and natural environments\, where Digital Twins convey evermore perfect i
 mages and models of tangible real-world objects: buildings\, trees\, river
 s\, … But is this a sustainable endeavor? Will we eventually end up with
  a Digital Twin of the Babel Tower? This lecture addresses these questions
  through a retrospective of some 30 years dedicated to Geographic Informat
 ion Systems and the modeling of our geographical space at LASIG\, and summ
 arizes a few related challenges for research and teaching.\n\n\n\nAbout th
 e speaker\nWith a high school education in both humanities and sciences\, 
 François Golay obtained an MS (diploma) degree in rural and geomatics eng
 ineering from EPFL in 1982. He then oriented his activities towards the em
 erging field of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) as a research and tea
 ching assistant and scientist at EPFL. After an internship at the Ecole Po
 lytechnique de Montréal\, he obtained a PhD (Dr sc. tech.) in 1992 with a
  focus on GIS modeling and design under the supervision of Prof. Pierre Ho
 wald and Dr. Jean-Jacques Chevallier. After a few years with the start-up 
 company SIT-Conseil as head of GIS analysis and design activities\, he spe
 nt one year at the University of Washington in Seattle before returning to
  EPFL as an associate professor for GIS. He developed the GIS research lab
  (LASIG) as a large competence platform supporting research and teaching a
 ctivities in the field of geographic information sciences. Appointed as a 
 full professor\, he was the first director of the newly created Institute 
 for local and regional planning and design (INTER) at the ENAC School in 2
 002\, and he was the head of EPFL’s program in Environmental Sciences an
 d Engineering (SIE) from 2013 to 2021. Over this time\, he has advised som
 e 20 PhD theses and numerous MSc theses\, predominantly addressing empiric
 al research aimed at fostering the value of geographic information and sci
 ences for decision support and assessing its organizational and societal i
 mpacts. He has been Swiss delegate for several COST actions in the field o
 f Urban Engineering\, as well as for the European Spatial Data Research Or
 ganization (EuroSDR).\n\n\n\n 
LOCATION:RLC E1 240 https://plan.epfl.ch/?room==RLC%20E1%20240 https://epf
 l.zoom.us/j/65289101234
STATUS:CONFIRMED
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