Management Committee
The Management Committe of the COST C21 Action includes the following experts.
Jacques Teller - Chairman of the Action
LEMA - Université de Liège
LEMA is a research group attached to the Department of Architecture and Urban Configuration Studies at the University of Liege. It benefits from special capabilities in urban project management methodology and decision-making process applications. Its present involvement (since 1993) in practical urban historic-city-centre requalification projects (at several development stages) gives the group members a broader view of the whole process and a more accurate perception of actual urban decision makers' needs. Albert Dupagne participated in and led the COST UCE Action C4. LEMA is the coordinator of the SUIT FP5 RTD project, dedicated to the Sustainable development of Urban historical areas through active Integration within Towns. It also participates in the PETUS (Practical Evaluation Tools for Urban Sustainability) FP5 RTD project.
Catherine Roussey - Leader of WG 1
LIRIS INSA de Lyon
LIRIS (Lyon Research Center for Images and Information Systems) is a new laboratory created on January 1, 2003 from three existing computing laboratories in Lyon (LISI, LIGIM and FRV) and shared by CNRS, Claude Bernard University of Lyon (Lyon 1), Lumiere University of Lyon (Lyon II), and the Lyon National Institute for Applied Sciences (INSA-Lyon). Now it regroups around 150 researchers. Previously led by Prof. Robert Laurini, under the name of LISI, various research activities were made in GIS (spatial indexing, quality control, spatial reasoning, distributed GIS, etc.), and in visual systems. Now LIRIS carries out research in real time GIS, interoperability, urban ontologies, databases for continuous phenomena, etc.); see http://lisi.insa-lyon.fr/~laurini for more details. LISI was a member of the COST UCE action C4 project, and has organised a workshop on Groupware for Urban Planning in February 1998.
Paolo Ventura - Leader of WG 2
DUPT University of Florence
DUPT (Dipartimento di Urbanistica e Pianificazione del Territorio), which consists of about seventy teachers and researchers, makes part of the School of Architecture at the University of Florence. The action research group, which, coordinated by Paolo Ventura, consists of four teachers and two young researchers, is active in the following fields of research: regional planning (area-wide and environmental planning); town planning and urban outdoor design (particularly referred to roadway infrastructure and public or private services); theoretical models of new town and urban areas; town planning and Urban maintenances as a strategy of sustainability development; historical-city-centre planning. The team is currently involved in a national research, carried on by three different universities (Rome Engineering School, Rome Architecture School, Firenze Univ. School) about town design and traffic calming measures, and an international research about a town planning glossary (with ETSI Caminos).
Chantal Berdier
EDU INSA de Lyon
The research laboratory "Equipe Développement Urbain" EDU is focussing on technical and spatial urban patterns, and especially objects, systems and public services) which are composing the city. In contemporary societies most design and construction actions do not include the participation of users. The gap between those who produce and those who use urban spaces leads to the problem of acceptation of urban design objects by citizens and especially the relationship between the technical design objects and the value of social use of those objects. The values of users, their practices and their expertise must be implemented in the design of technical and spatial patterns. The issues of this process kind of relation constitute the main research question of the EDU lab, i.e. how can technical design object achieve their special value of usage. Since several years the EDU lab is working on a new language for town planning for a better understanding of issues, problems and relations between different users and producers of urban spaces. Facing these topics, EDU will participate at the on going research project.
Miguel Angel Bernabé
Universitad Politecnica de Madrid
Andranel Cotescu
Technical University of Civil Engineering
Enrique Calderón
ETSI Caminos - University of Madrid
The Departamento de Ordenación del Territorio, Urbanismo y Medio Ambiente makes part of the Escuela Técnica Superior de Ingenieros de Caminos of the Universidad politécnica de Madrid. Its main responsibilities are teaching and research in the fields its name suggests, namely urban, regional and environmental planning and development. In these fields the Department is active undertaking research work with national and international administrations, and the private initiative. Regarding the European Union, the Department regularly cooperates with DG Regio, DG Environment and DG Research and also with the Dublin-based European Foundation for the Improvement of Living and Working conditions.
Gilles Falquet
Université de Genève
Anssi Joutsiniemi
Technical University of Tampere
Anssi Joutsiniemi is working as a senior lecturer in the Department of Architecture, Institute of Urban Planning and Design of the Technical University of Tampere. His educational background is in architecture (M.Arch) and he is just about to finish his dissertation on configurational properties on urban street networks.
Kostas Karatzas
Aristotle University of Thessaloniki
Guri Krigsvoll
Norwegian Building Research Institute
Jarmo Laitinen
Tampere University of Technology
Giuseppe Las Casas
LISUT Basilicata University
LISUT (Laboratory for Urban Systems Engineering) belong to the Urban Planning Department of the Basilicata University. Its aims it to study urban and environmental systems giving special attention to methodologies. Led by Prof. Giuseppe Las Casas, LISUT will be in charge on urban risk management, and disaster preparedness in cities.
John Lee
HCRC YUniversity of Edinburgh
HCRC (the Human Communication Research Centre) at the University of Edinburgh is a leading centre for the study of communication from a cognitive point of view. Its 40 or so researchers have wide expertise in language, language modelling, formal semantics, psycholinguistics, computational linguistics and language technology. John Lee is deputy director of HCRC, on secondment from the Department of Architecture, where he has for many years researched on communication in design contexts, and in learning. A particular focus is the relations between language and other modalities (especailly drawing). He has been involved in many collaborative projects with national, European and US partners.
Claudine Metral
Université de Genève
Javier Nogueras Iso
Universitad de Zaragoza
The Advanced Information Systems Laboratory (IAAA) is an R&D group of the Higher Technological Center of the University of Zaragoza (Spain), which is composed of more than 25 researches (PhDs and Masters) from different areas (Computer science, Industrial Engineering, Geography, Statistics, Economics and Library Science). The work of IAAA is oriented towards the development of R&D projects (funded by public and private organizations) in the areas of Spatial Data Infrastructures, Geographic Information Systems, Interoperable Geoprocessing, Web Services and Semantic Web. Additionally, IAAA is also interested in the transference of the research results and the implementation of the emerging technologies in the industrial and business environment by means of collaboration and consultancy projects with companies and institutions. As regards the work with ontologies, IAAA is interested in the use of ontologies in the context of the aforementioned areas (especially Spatial Data Infrastructures) in order to facilitate: the semantic interoperability among services and services chaining; and the improvement of information retrieval and interoperability of data and metadata.
Giovanni Rabino
DIAP
Geocomputation Laboratory is the laboratory for geo-computation of the Department DiAP (Milan) devoted to connecting planning and policies issues and geographical data base management (GIS) with technological tools (Models, Statistical Methods, Communication and Visualization tools). Different researches are in progress. Giovanni Rabino and Lidia Diappi are the scientific responsibles.
Stefan Transan-Matu
Romanian Academy
RIAI (the Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence) has been establshed in 1994. The main research directions at RIAI are natural language processing, conceptual modelling, e-learning, collaborative work, machine learning and knowledge acquisition. The activities of the institute also include know-how dissemination, education in artificial intelligence, and organisation of national and international conferences, summer schools, and seminars. Each year, since its foundation, it was rated highest (Excellency institution) within the Romanian Academy yearly evaluation procedure. Stefan Trausan-Matu is both principal researcher at RIAI and full professor at the Computer Science Department of the Politehnica University of Bucharest, the most important technical university in Romania.
Chris Tweed - Leader of WG 3
School of Architecture Queen's University of Belfast
The School of Architecture at the Queen's University of Belfast (QUB) has developed expertise in the application of information and communications technologies (ICTs) to the built environment, particularly in CAD representation, decision support and argumentation capture, visualization, and virtual reality. Chris Tweed has represented the UK in two COST UCE Actions (C4 and C8), and has been involved in ESPRIT (ACORD P393), JOULE (COMBINE), and FP5 (SUIT, WINDS) projects, as well as nationally funded research in CAD and environmental modelling. Dr Tweed previously developed the MOLE system at EdCAAD which pioneered object-oriented and logic modelling representations for buildings. Current research on dynamic urban information systems is being funded through the Virtual Engineering Centre at QUB, with a particular emphasis on mobile computing applications and dynamic building recognition.
