Laure Berti-Équille

IRD (ESPACE DEV U228) / Aix-Marseille Université (LIS UMR CNRS 7020)

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  Research Focus

My research is focused on methods and systems that assist users in complex, necessary analytical tasks for data intelligence. These tasks require advanced data management, integration, fusion, cleaning, and knowledge discovery that scale to very large datasets. The final goal is to let the users focus exclusively on the logic of their application, without being aware of the underlying models or of the execution details. My work draws from techniques in several areas, including data management, data mining, and machine learning, and solves problems in relational, semi-structured and cross-modal data (from various physical as well as social sensors, images, texts, microblogs, etc.). My focus is on the following key aspects of Data Science:


Experience

  • Jan. 2011 – Present:                Research Director (DR2), Institut de Recherche pour le Développement (IRD, U228), France
  • Sept. 2017 – Aug. 2018:            Full Professor, Aix-Marseille University, Polytech'Marseille, LIS (UMR CNRS 7020), France
  • March 2014 – June 2017:      Senior Research Scientist, Qatar Computing Research Institute (QCRI), Qatar
  • Jan. 2010 – Dec. 2010:           Researcher (Marie Curie Fellowship), University of Rennes 1, France
  • Sept. 2007 – Dec. 2009:          Visiting Researcher (Marie Curie Fellowship), AT&T Labs–Research, NJ, USA
  • Sept. 2004 – Aug. 2006:          Researcher, CNRS (UMR 6074), IRISA Rennes, France
  • Sept. 2000 – Aug. 2010:          Associate Professor with tenure, University of Rennes 1, France
  • July 1999 – Sept. 2000:          Post-doc (A.T.E.R.), University of Avignon, France
  • March 1996 – July 1999:        Ph.D. candidate and teaching assistant, University of Toulon, France
  • Oct. 1995 – March 1996:        Part-time Software Engineer, AERO-SEMA Group, France
  • March 1995 – Sept. 1995:      Analyst (Internship), French Navy, DGA/ECN/CTSN, France

Publications

Partial lists can be found in:   [DBLP]  [ResearchGate]  [GoogleScholar]  [LinkedIn]

Books

Chapters

Edition of Proceedings and Editorial Papers

Journal Publications

Conference and Workshop Publications

2017
2016
2015
2014
2013
2011
2010
2009
2008
2007
2006
2005
2004
2003
2002
2001
≤ 2000

Demos and Posters

Grants, Patents, Fellowships and Awards

Grants and Responsabilities

  • Oct. 2012 – Aug. 2016: French Research Grant funded by ANR (French National Agency for Research) Numerical Modeling Call 2012 for the project “COCLICO: COllaboration, Classification, Incrémentalité et COnnaisssances” ” (PI: ICUBE Lab, 6 partners), Funding received by my lab ESPACE DEV: 250 432 €.
  • June. 2012 – Dec. 2012: French Research Grant funded by CNRS, MASTODONS 2012 Call for the project “AMADEUS: Analysis of MAssive Data in Earth and Universe Sciences” (PI: LABRI Lab, 5 partners), My role: Task Leader, Global project funding received by the PI’s lab: 70 000 €.
  • Nov. 2011 – Aug. 2013: French Research Grant funded by ANR (French National Agency for research) Numerical Modeling 2012 Call, “FRESQUEAU: Data mining for assessing and monitoring the hydrobiologic quality of running waters” (PI: ENGEES Lab, 5 partners), My role: Task Leader, Global project funding: 183 550 €.
  • Sept. 2007 – Dec. 2010: European Marie Curie Outgoing International Fellowship (FP6-MOIF-CT-2006-041000), “Quality-introspective Data Management System”, 24+12 months (+ 4 months maternity leave), My role: PI, Funding received by my lab IRISA-Univ. Rennes 1: 201 583 €.
  • Dec. 2003- Dec. 2005: European Integrated Project ENTHRONE (FP6-2002-IST-2.3.1.8) “End-to-End QoS through Integrated Management of Content, Networks and Terminals”, Phase 1, (PI: Thales Broadcast & Multimedia, 32 partners), My role: Task Leader, Funding received by my lab, IRISA-INRIA: 145 605 €.
  • Jan. 2002 – Aug. 2007: French Collaborative Research Grant with the Military Schools of Coëtquidan, France, “Intelligent Parsing, Indexing and Querying Deductive XML for Pedagogical Materials of the French Military Staff Training”, My role: PI and PhD Advisor, Funding received by my lab IRISA-Univ. Rennes 1: 35 300 €
  • Dec. 2003 – Dec. 2008: French Research Grant funded by ANR (French Agency of Research), “QUADRIS: Quality of Multi-source Data and Information Systems” (PI: INRIA, 5 partners), My role: PI, Funding received by my lab IRISA: 110 000 €.

Patents

  • Detecting dependence between sources, United States Patent 8190546, issued 5/29/2012 and co-invented with X. L. Dong and D.
  • Scalable Automatic Repair for minimal change and maximal likelihood, European Patent 12724324.4 issued on May 25, 2012 co-invented with Mohamed Yakout and Ahmed K. Elmagarmid.
  • Scalable Automatic Repair for minimal change and maximal likelihood, United States Patent: 9619494 - 13/115.253 issued on April 11, 2017, co-invented with Mohamed Yakout and Ahmed K. Elmagarmid.

Awards

  • William Mong Visiting Research Fellowship, Hong-Kong University, 2018-2019
  • Prix de la Ville de Marseille, Accueil de chercheur, 2018
  • ICIQ 2011 Best Paper Award for the paper entitled “DAQ_UWE: A Framework doe Designing Data Quality Aware Web Applications” with C. Guerra-García, I. Caballero, Laure Berti-Équille, M. Piattini. In Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Information Quality (ICIQ 2011), Adelaide, Australia, November 2011.
  • Marie Curie Outgoing International Fellowship 2006 (FP6-MOIF-CT-2006-041000), 3 years funding (2007-2010) from the European Commission (selection rate: 18.8% of 445 submissions).
  • Best Junior Researcher paper INFORSID (French Conference on Information Systems) for the paper entitled “Qualité de données multi-sources et recommandation multi-critère”, INFORSID, 1999.

Talks

Tutorials and Invited Lectures

Invited Seminars and Key Notes

Service

Associate and Guest Editor

  • Associate Editor of the international journal ACM Journal on Data and Information Quality
  • Editor of 7 proceedings of national and international workshops and conferences (ICIQ 2012, QDB 2009 in conjunction with VLDB 2009, IQIS 2005 in conjunction with ACM SIGMOD 2005, QDC 2005, 2006, 2010, and 2011 in conjunction with the French conference EGC)
  • Journal referee for Journal of Data Management Research
  • Editorial board member of Journal on Information Quality and Journal of Digital Information Management

Program and Organization Committees

  • Co-chair of ICIQ 2016, the 21st International Conference on Information Quality, Ciudad Real, Spain
  • Co-organizer of the International Quality in Databases workshop (QDB 2016) selected in conjunction with VLDB 2016, Delhi, India, September 2016
  • PC chair of ICIQ 2012, the 17th International Conference on Information Quality, Paris, France.
  • Co-organizer and PC-co-chair of two international workshops Information Quality in Information Systems (IQIS 2005) and Quality in Databases (QDB 2009) in conjunction ACM SIGMOD 2005 and VLDB 2009 respectively
  • Co-organizer and PC chair of four workshop editions on Data and Knowledge Quality (QDC 2005, 2006, 2010, and 2011) in conjunction with the French conference on Data mining
  • Co-founder of EXQI, the first non-profit organization dedicated to data quality and data governance networking for French companies
  • PC member of more than 60 international and national conferences and workshops since 2000 including recently CIKM 2018, ICDE 2018, MIT-ICIQ 2017, BDA 2017

Mentoring

  • PhD Jury Committee Member and PhD Reviewer of 10+ PhD candidates
  • Supervision of 40+ young researcher internships and co-supervision of 5 PhD students

Teaching

As an Associate Professor (with tenure) from 2000 to 2010 and a Full Professor from 2017 to 2018, I taught (lessons and practical work) from 192 to 300 hours per year at the Computer Science departments of several universities and engineering schools: Aix-Marseille University (PolyTech'Marseille), University of Montpellier 2, University of Toulon, University of Avignon, and University of Rennes 1, INSA Rennes, ENST Brest in France as well as at University of Cape Coast in Ghana and University of Yaoundé in Cameroon, Africa in the volunteering initiative of AHED (Academics for Higher Education & Development)). I’ve developed numerous lecture notes, slides, and other pedagogical materials for undergraduate and graduate students on various topics of Data Science:

  • Data Management;
  • Advanced Database Administration and Tuning;
  • Machine Learning;
  • Data Warehousing;
  • Semantic Web Technologies;
  • Operating Systems;
  • Software Engineering Project Management.

Students

@Qatar Computing Research Institute, Qatar

  • Kushal Sha (October 2015 – July 2016) M.Sc. Intern, Urban computing: traffic density near-future forecasting.
  • Mouhamadou Lamine Ba (October 2015 – April 2016), Research Associate (Postdoc), Truth discovery for Web data and spatio-temporal events.
  • Aisha El-Allam (May 2015 – July 2015) M.Sc. Summer Intern, Qatar-CMU, Traffic Density Prediction based on Bluetooth sensored data.
  • Posha Dave (May 2015-July 2015) M.Sc. Summer Intern, Qatar-CMU, Information Extraction for Truth Discovery.
  • Naman Goel (October 2014 – February 2015, Internship) B.Tech, M.Tech in Computer Science & Engineering from Indian Institute of Technology, BHU: Meta-classifier for truth discovery, explanation and allegation.
  • Dalia Attia Waguih (November 2013 – August 2014, Internship), M.Sc. in Computer Science from Alexandria University, Egypt: Truth discovery algorithms implementation and experimental study.
  • Mahmood Neshati, Ph.D. in information retrieval from Sharif University of Technology, Tehran, Iran (May 2014 – August 2014, Internship): Combining constraint-based approaches with data mining-based approaches for detecting and repairing anomalies.

@Institut de Recherche pour le Développement, France

  • Andres Troya (October 2013 – October 2016, Ph.D. thesis) co-supervised with Prof. Gançarski, Strasbourg University, France: Collaborative Approach and Data and Knowledge Quality in Multi-Paradigm Remote Sensing Image Analysis.
  • Hatim Chahdi (October 2013 – July 2017, Ph.D. thesis) co-supervised with Dr Isabelle Mougenot, Montpellier University 2: Ontology-enhanced data classification.
  • Eva Serrano (October 2013 – January 2017, Ph.D. thesis) co-supervised with Prof. Armienta, UNAM, Mexico: Impact of data quality on the interpretations of statistical analysis results of Environmental Studies: Application to the Evaluation of the impact of emerging pollutants on the quality of the water of the rivers Tula, Taxco, Culiacan and Humaya in Mexico.
  • Cesar Guerra, Ph.D., (May 2011 – July 2011, Ph.D. Internship) co-supervised with Dr Ismael Caballero, Univ. Castilla-La Mancha: A Framework for Designing Data Quality Aware Web Applications.

@University of Rennes 1, France

  • Anicet KOUOMOU-CHOUPO, University of Rennes 1 (December 2002 – February 2006, Ph.D. thesis): Improving Similarity Search in Very Large Image Databases with Multimedia Mining Techniques.
  • Jean-André BENVENUTI, University of Rennes 1 (December 2002 – December 2008, Ph.D. thesis): Intelligent Parsing of XML Pedagogical Materials for Military Staff Training.
  • Ravi JAIN, University of South Australia (February 2007 – September 2007, Post-Doc): Quality-Awareness for Data Clustering.
  • Yongluan ZHOU, National University of Singapore (October 2005 – March 2006, Ph.D. Internship): Quality-Driven Distributed Query Planning and Optimization Based on Data Quality Negotiation.
  • Manuel BES (September 2001 – June 2002, M.Sc. Internship): Comparative Study of Association Rule Discovery Algorithms for Genomic Data Mining.
  • Anne CHARLERY (September 2002 – June 2003, M.Sc. Internship): Indexing Techniques for Genomic Data.
  • Mehrez CHAIKHA-DOUAIHY (February 2005 – June 2005, M.Sc. Internship): Optimizing Content-Based Image Retrieval.
  • Wilfried JOUVE (February 2005 – August 2005, M.Sc. Internship): Enriching Multimedia Content Description for Broadcast Environments.

Biographical Sketch

Laure Berti-Équille is a Research Director at Institut de Recherche pour le Développement (IRD), the French research institute for sustainable development.Before, she was a full professor at Aix-Marseille University (AMU), senior scientist at Qatar Computing Research Institute (Hamad Bin Khalifa University, Qatar), Associate Professor (with tenure) at University of Rennes 1 (France), and visiting researcher at AT&T Labs Research (USA) as a recipient of the prestigious European Marie Curie Outgoing Fellowship. Her interests are at the intersection of large-scale data analytics, and statistical machine learning with a focus on anomaly detection with more than 80 publications and three monographs. She initiated the very first workshop editions on information and data quality in information systems (IQIS 2005) and in databases (QDB 2009 and 2016) in conjunction with SIGMOD and VLDB respectively, and co-organized the first French workshops on Data and Knowledge Quality in conjunction with EGC (Extraction et Gestion de Connaissances) in 2005, 2006, 2010, and 2011. She has received various grants from the French Agency for National Research (ANR), the French National Research Council (CNRS), and the European Union. She received her "Habilitation" in CS from University of Rennes 1 in France in 2007, her Ph.D. in CS from University of Toulon in 1999, a M.Sc. degree in CS in 1996 from Univ. of Paris IX Dauphine, and a M.Sc. degree in Physics in 1995. She is also a Graduate Gemologist from GIA (GIA G.G., A.J.P.).

Address

Laboratoire d'Informatique et Systèmes (LIS)

Domaine Universitaire de Saint-Jérôme

Avenue Escadrille Normandie-Niemen

13397 Marseille Cedex 20, France

Contact

Prof. Laure Berti-Équille, Ph.D.

laure DOT berti AT lis - lab DOT fr

(+33) 04 91 05 60 16

Laure Berti-Équille

Along the way

Here are some quotes, pieces of advice, and thoughts I have been collecting through the years in the academia (anonymity preserved):

  • “Mediocrity is what you get when you unlock few men’s potential. What strikes me the most is when some men are given some responsibilities they don’t deserve: their ego inflates so much that they are no longer able to realize when their decisions are wrong, and when they should step back instead for pushing forward people around them using pressure and intimidation.”
  • “What to do with nepotism? Be obedient and kowtow to the supreme leadership. If this is impossible for you, be prepared to fight and loose with panache and timely back-up plans.”
  • Managers rise to the level of their incompetence and employees only stop being promoted once they can no longer perform effectively. Peter Principle, Laurence J. Peter, 1969.
  • Real-world example of leadership in a group meeting: “You should send fewer emails and work more instead of questioning the fairness of my decisions.”
  • Another example of leadership: “Ask a goat keeper to lead a research group in Rocket science. No doubt, he will achieve excellence in shepherding a flock of researchers as long as they conform as goats in the middle of the desert.”
  • “Don't forget that some of your colleagues suffer from the bucket-of-Indian-rats syndrome.” The metaphor (also known as the Crab mentality) refers to a bucket of rats. Individually, the rats could escape from the bucket, but instead they grabb at each other to prevent any from escaping.
  • “You are complaining about our near zero-woman workplace?!? What are you doing here in the first place? Stop being an agressive and hysteric female and be grateful to be sourrounded by brillant male colleagues capable of educating you.”
  • “Should you talk about your children at work? If you don't mention them, you will get a penalty for being a careless mother but if you do talk about them, you will get a penalty for being less committed to your job. What do you prefer?"