Biography for Robert Jeansoulin, Attaché for science & technology (IT), Embassy of France, Washington, DC (since July 2008).

Robert Jeansoulin, is a senior scientist (Directeur de recherche) in the computer science sector at CNRS. Before Washington DC, his last position was at Université Paris-Est (Marne-la-Vallée), teaching Data Bases, and pursuing research in Artificial Intelligence.

His particular topic is uncertainty. He investigates this topic as it applies to reasoning with space and time information, or “geomatics” (e.g.: geographic information for land cover change, urban and social behavior).

He received a Bachelor in Mathematics at Université de Provence, Marseille (FR), 1970. He completed a Master’s degree in computer science at Université Paul Sabatier, Toulouse (FR) in 1976, then a Docteur-Ingénieur degree at Institut Polytechnique de Toulouse, before completing a PhD in image processing at Université Paul Sabatier, in 1981. He is also Engineer in Computer Science, from the ENSEEIHT.

Prior to joining Marne-la-Vallée, Jeansoulin served as CNRS junior scientist in Toulouse, including one year on leave at the Medical Imaging Science Group of USC in Los Angeles, with grants from CNES and INRIA. Then he spent several years between INRIA, at Rocquencourt, and Université de Paris Sud, Orsay, where he served as Associate Professor.

Back at the CNRS, he worked in the Laboratoire de Robotique, at Pierre & Marie Curie Université (alias Jussieu, or Paris6). He was a co-founder, then head of the “Cassini” research network that introduced geomatics in France in the 80s. He served also as scientific advisor for the Social Sciences and Humanities Department SHS of CNRS for five years, fostering use of databases and mathematical approaches in this field.

More recently he acted as coordinator of two successive European projects, dedicated to “logical revision of the geographic information”: in the ESPRIT program, then in the FET-IST (future and emerging technologies for the information society) program, between 1998 and 2004, including one year on leave at the University Laval, where he received the title of Associate Professor in 2001, then renewed.

Inter-disciplinary collaboration was a constant focus throughout all this period.

He has published 4 books, 18 journal articles, and more than 60 papers in international, peer-reviewed conferences on image processing, spatial data bases, and artificial intelligence. He has supervised 20 PhD candidates, several of whom are now professors in different universities, or researchers in laboratories in France, Canada, Ireland, Tunisia.

He has received awards for papers (e.g. from the ASPRS in 2006) and software releases (from IGN in 1992, from Intergraph in 2004). He acted many times as expert in research project evaluation, in company innovation support (tax exemption), or researcher selection jury, in France, Switzerland, Canada, and for European programs.