Projects

The following sections give further details on my major contributions in different sofware development and R&D projects, classiffed anti-chronologically in the academic and private sectors. Project where I had a minor contribution and short term projects are not listed here. Projects on which there was a non-disclosure agreement are also not listed.

Note that the dates mentionned below are corresponding to the dates of my involvement in these projects, that may differ from the actual starting and ending dates of the underlying projects.

Academic sector

2012-2015 HASLER GREEN-MOD

The Green-Mod project aims at the elaboration of Information Systems able to optimize the energy consumption in a building while preserving human comfort. The main innovation of Green-Mod project is the realization of reliable stochastic data-driven models applied to temporal signals acquired from heterogeneous sources such as distributed sensors, weather web services, calendar information and user-trigerred events. Several specific novelties are integrated to the project. These include: global, instead of local, optimization of building automation sub-systems (i.e. heating, ventilation, cooling, solar shadings, electric lightings); generalization to an unseen building configuration through self-learning data-driven algorithms; inclusion of a stochastic state-based modeling to better cope with seasonal and building activity patterns. The Green-Mod project will be applied to existing buildings already equipped with extended networks of sensors, as well as new building technologies, from which we can acquire data in order to validate our research results. Project partners: EPFL (for building physics expertise) and HES-SO (data modeling, algorithms, information systems).

2009-2012 Call hes Green-line

In this project (4 partners) we have built an "intelligent" plug able to measure local information (electricity load on the plug, temperature, presence) and route this information on the power line from plug to plug. The plug and communication protocol has been conceptualized to be low power with a proprietary communication based on spikes. In this project, my team has been working on the elaboration of the information system and the algorithms to take decisions from the sensor measurement. See the video. See the web site.

2007-2011 CTI Green-E 2.0, a highly configurable and interoperable web solution to compute the environmental impact of products, companies and industries.

I raised funding and managed this project for the University of Applied Sciences HES-SO // Wallis and for the company Ecointesys Life-Cycle System (now renamed in Quantis International). The project aimed at the development and commercialization of a web-based configurable and interoperable software solution able to quantify the environmental performance of companies and products using a Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) approach (ISO 14'040 - 44), producing clear and understandable environmental performance reports. The project is in the field of IT-for-green with specific challenges in the area of data search and manipulation.

2007-2011 RCSO GReen-T, IT solutions for the identification and traceability of products on mobile phones.

I raised funding and managed this project for the University of Applied Sciendes HES-SO // Wallis. This project is in the field of IT-for-Green, i.e. the use of IT for environmental applications. The objective of the project is to analyze and propose IT architectures for the identification and traceability of consumer products on mobile phones. Another objective is the elaboration of a working prototype able to compute a environmental label of bottled water. This project also included a part on image analysis, evaluating the use of content based machine retrieval (CBIR) for the identification of products, as an altertnative to bar-code.

2004-2007 IM2, Swiss National NCCR project, sub-project ACP (Phase I) and MPR (Phase II)

I managed two sub-projects for the University of Fribourg, both partially funded in the framework of IM2, the Swiss National Center of Competence in Research (NCCR) on Interactive Multimodal Information Management. Both projects were in the field of biometric technologies. The first one ("MyIDea") aimed at collecting a wide multimodal biometric database. The second one ("CHASM") is about advanced modelling of handwriting and speech signals acquired simultaneously.

2004-2007 BioSecure NoE, Sixth framework EU project

I am coordinating the efforts of the University of Fribourg for this EU project about biometrics. I am involved in the speech and hand modalities working groups as well as in the acquisition of a new multimodal database. Our institute is also involved in the research sub-project ("Ragga") about time-dependent fusion of multiple classifiers.

2005-2006 Statistical modeling for biometric applications

This project is about the use of statistical models such as GMMs or HMMs applied to biometric applications. Me and my colleagues are currently using these models for dynamic signature verification, speaker verification and face verification. More specifically, for signature verification, we are particularly interested on the robustness of our models against strong imposture of signatures, i.e. how easily can an impostor fool our models. We are also involved in BioGateway, a face verification system for securing network access. Biogateway aims at the concrete implementation of a client-server achitecture for securing network access with face verification. The implementation will be using a Linux server controlling the network routes and clients running a java GUI and simple webcams.

1993-1995 Himarnnet P6488, EU Esprit project

The main objective of this research project was the development and assessment of artifcial neural network techniques in order to improve state-of-the-art telephony speech recognition systems. As research assistant for EPFL, I was in charge of doing the research and reporting in the framework of the project. I worked in close collaboration with Ascom and L&H Speech Products (now Nuance).

Private sector

2000-2004 - RW 4170

I managed the contibution of UbiCall Communications to this belgian national funded R&D project. On average, the team included three persons in UbiCall and the project aimed at the development of advanced speech processing tools to be included in the product line of the company.

2001-2003 Consensus, Fifth framework EU project

While working for UbiCall Communications, I was in charge of managing the efforts of the company for this EU project. The objective of the project was the development of languages and tools to enable the seamless creation of highly usable mobile application. The partners of the projects included SAP, IBM, Nokia, Fujitsu Siemens and Cure.

2000-2004 Voxplorer Product Development, UbiCall Communications

As director of Technology, I was in charge of the technical developments of Voxplorer Receptionist, the core telephony product of the company. I managed a team of up to 5 engineers working in the area of software development, CTI, speech recognition and user interface design.

1998-2000 UBS voice-activated phonebanking

As System Architect for UBS, I was in charge of prototyping and field-testing the next-generation natural language telephony systems of the bank, in English, French and German. Further to voice-activation, we were also interested in speaker verification and other biometrics applied in the banking environment.

1998-2000 Picasso, EU project

While working for UBS, I was in charge of coordinating the efforts of the bank for PICASSO, a EU project in the framework of theTelematics Application Program. PICASSO focused on speaker recognition for secured telephone transactions using natural spoken language.

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