Denis Lalanne
denis.lalanne@unifr.ch
+41 26 300 8472
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7834-0417
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Professor,
Department of Informatics
PER 21 bu. A429
Bd de Pérolles 90
1700 Fribourg
Biography
Denis Lalanne is director of the Human-IST institute and full professor in the Department of Informatics of the University of Fribourg. He is heading the "human-building interaction" group in the smart living lab and Swiss representative at the IFIP TC13. After completing a PhD at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL) on computer supported creativity, a postDoc in the USER group in IBM Almaden research center, one year of teaching and research in the University of Avignon, and an experience as usability engineer in a swiss start-up, he joined the University of Fribourg in 2002 to work on the SNF NCCR IM2 as a senior researcher first and became professor in 2015 on the topic of Human-Machine Interaction. He founded the Human-IST in 2017 and developed it since then. He is broadly interested by different aspects of the domain of Human-Computer Interaction, with a focus on multimodal interaction and visual analytics. More recently his research are centered around the topic of Human-Building Interaction to understand and improve the comfort of buildings' occupants and on the topic of Human-AI Interaction to improve/evaluate the teaming or to support accessibility/rehabilitation.
Research and publications
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Publication list
184 publications
Understanding Research Themes and Interactions at Scale within Blind and Low-vision Research in ACM and IEEE
Jon E. Froehlich, Maximiliano Jeanneret Medina, Yong-Joon Thoo, Cédric Baudet, Nicolas Ruffieux, Denis Lalanne, ACM Transactions on Accessible Computing (2025) | Journal article -
Research projects
Tour Data Visualytics
Status: OngoingSwiss Post Human-IST Lab
Status: OngoingUnderstanding ALGorithmic gatekeepers to promote EPIstemic welfare (ALGEPI)
Status: OngoingStart 01.05.2023 End 30.04.2027 Funding SNSF Open project sheet Technological and economic developments have led to the availability of an overwhelming quantity of digital content. Therefore, it has become crucial, in particular for media content providers, to incorporate algorithmic gatekeepers, which filter, rank and recommend content. Are these algorithmic gatekeepers undermining media’s contribution to epistemic welfare? In ALGEPI, we start from the novel concept of epistemic welfare, defined as the individuals’ right to know and be exposed to trustworthy, independent and diverse information while respecting individual rights to their own data. By connecting legal, political, technological and sociocultural perspectives, we will develop a conceptual framework for epistemic welfare. This framework will allow us to understand the effects of algorithmic gatekeepers on epistemic welfare. The new interdisciplinary research program will build on multi-method empirical research applied to algorithmic gatekeepers. Thanks to the theoretical and empirical findings, we will be able to develop normative instruments to align algorithmic gatekeeping with epistemic welfare. Taking the novel concept of epistemic welfare as a starting point allows all project partners to embark on a joint, integrated exploration of the concept. This may lead to a paradigmatic shift in the conceptualization of the impact of algorithmic gatekeepers in media sectors, proposing to expand the notions of media pluralism and consumer welfare to epistemic welfare. SWICE (Sustainable Well-being for the Individual and the Collectivity in the Energy transition )
Status: OngoingStart 01.01.2023 End 31.12.2031 Funding Other The SWICE project aims to identify and quantify the energy saving potential and opportunities for increased quality of life that can emerge from future urban scenarios involving new modalities of living and working, changes in mobility behaviours, and different business models.
Financed by the Swiss Federal Office of Energy’s SWEET programme (Call 1-2021 “Living and Working)
iKnowU
Status: CompletedPreventing “Comfort Degradation” in Workplaces with Logi Personal Companion
Status: Completed28ème Conférence Francophone sur l’Interaction Homme-Machine
Status: CompletedStart 01.10.2016 End 31.12.2016 Funding SNSF Open project sheet Pour sa 28ème édition, la conférence francophone sur l'Interaction Homme-Machine vient en Suisse, à Fribourg. L'évènement coïncidera aussi avec les 20 ans de l'Association Francophone d'Interaction Homme-Machine (AFIHM). L’Association Francophone d’Interaction Homme-Machine et l’Université de Fribourg, avec le soutien de la HES-SO, sont heureux de vous accueillir à IHM’16, la 28ème Conférence Francophone sur l’Interaction Homme-Machine. La conférence aura lieu du 25 au 28 octobre 2016, sa présidence étant assurée par Denis Lalanne (Université de Fribourg) et Laurence Nigay (Université Grenoble Alpes). IHM16 sera, nous l’espérons, un lieu d'échanges entre les différents acteurs de la recherche en Interaction Homme-Machine. Nos ambitions avec cette édition d'IHM sont de : - Encourager la participation de jeunes chercheurs - Augmenter les liens entre laboratoires et entreprises, notamment locales, autour des problématiques d’IHM - Favoriser la pluridisciplinarité (informatique, psychologie, sociologie) - Promouvoir le domaine de l’Interaction Homme-Machine en Suisse et de tisser un lien fort avec le reste de la communauté en Interaction Homme-Machine - Profiter de cet événement pour sensibiliser le canton et ses institutions de l’importance de cette discipline EmotiBoard: Real-time Emotion Detection and Visualization
Status: CompletedHumanitics - Visualizing Migration Flows and their Development in Time
Status: CompletedStart 01.04.2011 End 31.05.2013 Funding SNSF Open project sheet Humanitics - Visualizing Migration Flows and their Development in Time Human centered design and evaluation
Status: CompletedStart 01.01.2010 End 31.12.2013 Funding SNSF Open project sheet The goal of IP2 in the third phase of IM2 is to validate and generalize the technologies developed through research in the first two phases of IM2. The capacity to generalize these technologies will be demonstrated (1) through their application to new environments, other than smart meeting rooms, in combination with third-party technology, and (2) through their acceptance by various groups of users, which will be shown by formal studies of user requirements and user-oriented evaluation. The environments that are planned to be designed and implemented in IP2 will follow a novel approach which departs from the smart meeting rooms of Phases 1 and 2. The new instrumented environments are intended to augment teamwork by using “lightweight” devices which will support team processes without being in the foreground, and without requiring from users a series of complex steps to initialize and run them. Neither participants, nor external operators will need to devote their attention to the tools, but instead will be helped to focus on their meeting purpose. Technology will thus be in the background, embedded into the physical environment of the rooms, that is, into furniture such as tables, lamps, or walls. The approach of IP2 believes that intelligence is distributed among meeting participants or individual users, and does not lie directly in the technology, which simply provides hints and scaffolds productive interactions. Therefore, IP2 has two related objectives: - Develop new, lightweight applications, making use of IM2 technologies, and mainly oriented towards teamwork support. - Develop and apply formal user-centric evaluation methods, targeting the evaluation of a selection of systems, both from phase 1 and 2 technology, and from the new applications. Humanitics: Visual Analytics for All
Status: CompletedStart 01.04.2009 End 31.03.2011 Funding SNSF Open project sheet The overall goal of this project is to develop visual analytics tools for public organizations to enhance knowledge discovery, analytical capabilities, decision making, information exchange and communication. The targeted users are from countries all around the world, including least developed countries that generally do not have access to this type of technology. Each year, the United Nation manipulates and reports numerous data and information concerning world-wide health, illicit drug trade, environment and global climate change, diseases, energy, conflict, and humanitarian development concerns. The UN urgently needs authoring tools to analyse these data and cross correlate them in a visual way, not only to improve visual understanding, but also for analysts to produce meaningful visualizations to present their findings. UN also needs user friendly tools to browse through these findings and produce reports; tools that should be usable by everybody (all countries). Visual analytics is the science of analytical reasoning facilitated by interactive visual interfaces. People use visual analytics tools and techniques to synthesize information and derive insight from massive, dynamic, ambiguous, and often conflicting data; detect the expected and discover the unexpected; provide timely, defensible, and understandable assessments; and communicate assessment effectively for action. The US has already started a NSF program on visual analytics, driven principally by security issues, to track terrorism and abnormal behaviours. This National Science Foundation (NSF) program is a long run initiative and implicates about 20 American institutions (academics and industrials). “The U.S. Government faces a critical challenge in identifying and preventing attacks on U.S. soil. The National Visualization and Analytics Center (NVAC) is a national and international resource providing strategic leadership and coordination for visual analytics technology and tools. NVAC supports the Department of Homeland Security’s mission to secure our homeland and protect the American people by giving analysts and emergency responders technology and capabilities to: Detect, prevent, and reduce the threat of terrorist attacks; Identify and assess threats and vulnerabilities to our homeland; Recover and minimize damage from terrorist attacks, should they occur. “ We believe this multi-billon dollar (USD) American NSF initiative on visual analytics should be complemented by an European initiative using visual analytics not for tackling security and terrorism issues but driven by humanistic and world-wide needs and issues. Information access and understanding is crucial in our modern society, not only to insure security and control of rich countries, but also for all countries to understand the impact of their public policies on a world-wide perspective. Information is power and everybody, including third parties countries, should have access to it. The associated research challenges cover (1) setting up a toolkit, integrating state of the art visualization and mining techniques, facilitating Visual Analytics application development by endusers and (2) developing mechanisms for analysts to annotate data and visualizations, in order to build collectively and incrementally their knowledge. VisMaster CA: Visual Analytics - Mastering the Information Age
Status: CompletedStart 01.08.2008 End 30.09.2010 Funding Europe Open project sheet One of the most important challenges of the emerging Information Age is to effectively utilise the immense wealth of information and data acquired, computed and stored by modern information systems. On the one hand, the appropriate use of available information volumes offers large potential to realize technological progress and business success. On the other hand, there exists the severe danger that users and analysts easily get lost in irrelevant, or inappropriately processed or presented information, a problem which is generally called the information overload problem. Visual Analytics is an emerging research discipline developing technology to make the best possible use of huge information loads in a wide variety of applications. The basic idea is to appropriately combine the strengths of intelligent automatic data analysis with the visual perception and analysis capabilities of the human user.We propose a Coordination Action to join European academic and industrial RandD excellence from several individual disciplines, forming a strong Visual Analytics research community. An array of thematic working groups set up by this consortium will focus on advancing the state of the art in Visual Analytics. Specifically, the working groups will join excellence in the fields of data management, data analysis, spatial-temporal data, and human visual perception research with the wider visualisation research community. This Coordination Action will (1.) form and shape a strong European Visual Analytics community, (2.) define the European Visual Analytics Research Roadmap, (3.) expose public and private stakeholders to Visual Analytics technology and (4.) set the stage for larger follow-up Visual Analytics research initiatives in Europe. The Risk Manager Dashboard
Status: CompletedStart 01.01.2008 End 31.12.2008 Funding Other Open project sheet Visualization for assessing and managing risk in corporate networks through metrics and user behavior analysis. Summary This project involves the Department of Computer Science of the University of Fribourg (DIUF) and NEXThink S.A., a start-up software company developing a new generation of security management solutions. The project will develop novel visualizations for risk monitoring in network security. New visual metrics will be developed in a way that risk can be correctly captured and easily understood by non-technical users. The project will also develop interactive visualizations to analyze the causes and consequences of changes in risk levels. The new system will be used to expand deployment of the solution with early-adopter customers and support large to very-large organizations with several dozen of thousands of employees. Human Computer Interface (HMI)
Status: CompletedStart 01.01.2006 End 31.12.2009 Funding Other Open project sheet Imagine that you missed a two-hour meeting with your colleagues, but that this meeting was recorded. You want to know what you missed, but you do not want to replay the entire meeting. Instead, you want to find quickly just the parts that most interest you.While other researchers within IM2 develop analysis and recognition technologies to address this need, the primary objective of this work is to build on these other technologies to develop interactive browsing systems.The objectives of this project fall into three broad categories: 1. Design novel interactive meeting browsers. 2. Develop working prototypes, suitable for human testing. 3. Evaluate the usability of these interactive prototypes with human subjects. In particular, the University of Fribourg will design three examples of document-centric multimedia meeting browsers: FriDoc and FaericWorld. A user-centred design approach will include use-case definition, mock-ups and low-fidelity prototype creation. • FriDoc, i.e. FRIbourg DOCument-centric multimedia meeting browser, will be improved to integrate most of the available document annotations and document multimodal alignments. Further, FriDoc will be replicated using JFerret. • FaericWorld builds upon FriDoc to navigate across collections of multimedia documents.The system will explore the automatic creation and use of multimodal links based on time, words, people, geographic locations, and references (citations, hyperlinks, etc.). FaericWorld will browse through collections of audio/video meeting recordings, conferences, TV news (with text captions), and documents such as newspapers. MeModules
Status: CompletedStart 01.01.2006 End 31.12.2009 Funding Other Open project sheet Tangible interfaces can be useful to establish links between our memory and information. We call this type of tangible interface "MEMODULES". They roost abstract information in the real world through tangible reminders. MEMODULES are tiny tagged physical objects containing a link towards information sources. We consider them as tangible hypermarks, i.e. physical object embedding a hyperlink to abstract information. Network Security Intelligence through Distributed User Behaviour Modelling and Interactive Visualizations
Status: CompletedHuman-machine integration
Status: CompletedStart 01.01.2005 End 31.12.2009 Funding SNSF Open project sheet This IP has a research component (pursuing the most promising and/or fundamental research directions initiated in IM2-II), as well as a strong integration and evaluation component. Hence, besides further pursuing some of the most promising research direction in multimodal processing in the strict context of the IM2 vision, one of the objectives of IP1 will be to extend the applications of multimodal technologies, within the human meeting and conference framework, towards more integrated systems that work in real time, with human intervention only when required. Two of the recent prototypes developed in IM2, the Automatic Content Linking Device and the Mobile Meeting Assistant appear as particularly promising starting points for system integration in IM2 Phase III. Document Integration (DI)
Status: CompletedStart 01.01.2002 End 31.12.2005 Funding Other Open project sheet The National Center of Competence in Research (NCCR) on Interactive Multimodal Information Management, in brief IM2, is aimed at the advancement of research, and the development of prototypes, in the field of man-machine interaction. The NCCR is particularly concerned with technologies coordinating natural input and output modes (such as speech, image, pen, touch, gestures, etc.). The main objective of IM2 Document Integration project is to align various types of documents with video and speech recordings of meetings. Different kind of static documents used during a meeting, either distributed in paper form or projected on a screen, are analyzed and compared to video and speech data in order to allow further linking between the different modalities. In other words, the main goal of the project is to bridge the gap between non-temporal documents and other temporal medias. IM2.DI
Status: Completed