Pascal Francq
Pascal Francq's Opinions
Pascal Francq's WikiCS
1 Biography
Pascal Francq earned his Master's degree in applied science and his Phd thesis at the Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB).
From 2003 until 2008, he held the chair in information systems and in digital information at the ULB.
He decided to quit due to the lack of time and resources for his research activities.
He is currently financed by a project of the Walloon Region at the Université Catholique de Louvain (UCL).
In 2010, he founded the Paul Otlet Institute to continue his research and teaching projects. He is the current president of the insitute.
His research topics are centred around the Internet: its technologies, its
societal aspects and its support as a platform for knowledge sharing.
He published a book on the Internet object: its histories, its myths,
the practices it allows et its issues.
Since 1998, he worked on automatic detection of communities of interests, and is the main contributor of the GALILEI platform.
It also supplies WikiCS.
He is currently working on the XML corpus clustering as well as the expertise detection in document corpus (such as emails).
Pascal Francq has particularly specialized in optimization techniques based on
genetic algorithms, which he adapted the principles to several problems.
2 Contributions
Pascal Francq is the maintainer and the main contributor of the R and GALILEI projects.
Scientifically, he developed :
- A tensor space model to describe objects (such as documents or user profiles) in conceptual space (which dimensions correspond to the different concepts).
- A similarity measure between two objects (for example two documents) by taking into account different categories of concepts (content, metadata and structure).
- An adaptation of the “user relevance feedback” methods to compute user interests.
- Two adaptations of Grouping Genetic Algorithms (GGA) for object clustering when a similarity measure exists : the Similarity-based Grouping Genetic Algorithm (SGGA) and the Nearest Neighbors Grouping Genetic Algorithm (NNGGA).
- The Hierarchical Generic Algorithms (HGA), a genetic algorithmtaht builds a hierarchy of objets, each objet being represented by a liste of attributes. The HGA was applied for the semi-automatic construction of a thesaurus.
- The 2D Genetic Algorithms (2D-GA), a kind of genetic algorithms to place a series of objects on a given surface. The 2D-GA was applied during a research project dedicated to the placement of electronic components on a silicon chip.
3 Main publications
- Francq, P. (2014), Neutrality in internet regulation: three regulatory principles, white paper, Paul Otlet Institute.
- Francq, P. (2011). Internet. Tome I: La construction d’un mythe (EME Intercommunications).
- Francq, P. (2011). Internet. Tome II : Le caractère fétiche (EME Intercommunications).
- Francq, P. (2011). Le Web 2.0 et ses nouveaux corpus. Le discours et la Langue, (2.1), 105-119.
- Francq, P. (2011). Les bibliothèques publiques à l’ère numérique (Rapport de mission).
- P. Francq (Ed.) (2010). Collaborative Search and Communities of Interest: Trends in Knowledge Sharing and Assessment. Idea Group Publishing.
- P. Francq (2008). Knowledge Networks: The social software perspective. In M. D. Lytras, R. Tennyson and P. Ordonez De Pablos (Ed.), Knowledge Networks: The social software perspective, pp. 61-73. USA, Idea Group Publishing.
- F. Abbaci and P. Francq (2008). XML Components Ranking : Which Relevant Ranking Criteria? Which Relevant Criteria Merging? First IEEE International Conference on the Applications of Digital Information and Web Technologies (ICADIWT'08), Ostrava, Czech Republic.
- Y. Breindl and P. Francq (2008). Can Web 2.0 applications save e-democracy? A study of how new Internet applications may enhance citizen participation in the political process on-line. International Journal of Electronic Democracy, Vol. 1, No. 1, pp. 14-31.
- P. Francq (2007). The GALILEI Platform: Social Browsing to Build Communities of Interests and Relevant Information and Expertise. In M. D. Lytras and A. Naeve (Ed.), Open source for knowledge and learning management : strategies beyond, pp. 319–342. Idea Group Publishing.
- F. Abbaci and P. Francq (2007). Multi-criteria Decision Support to Rank XML Fragments. Proceedings of the 2007 International Conference on Internet Computing, pp.144-149. Las Vegas, USA.
- F. Abbaci, J.-B. Valsamis and P. Francq (2006). Index and Search XML Documents by Combining Content and Structure. Proceedings of the 2006 International Conference on Internet Computing. Las Vegas, USA.
- E. Vin, P. Francq and A. Delchambre (2006). A Grouping Genetic Algorithm (SIMOGGAs) simultaneously to solve two grouping problems applied to the cell formation problem with alternative process plans. Group Technology/Cellular Manufacturing 06.
- F. Abbaci, P. Francq and A. Delchambre (2005). Query Generation for Personalized Tracking of Information. Proceedings of the 2005 International Conference on Internet Computing, CSREA Press, pp. 348-353. Las Vegas, USA.
- P. Francq and A. Delchambre (2005). Using documents assessments to build communities of interests. 2005 International Symposium on Applications and the Internet, IEEE Press, pp. 327-333. Trento, Italy.
- V. Vandaele, P. Francq and A. Delchambre (2004). Analyse d'hyperliens en vue d'une meilleure description des profils. Proceedings of JADT 2004, pp. 1117-1126. Louvain-La-Neuve, Belgium.
- N. Kumps, P. Francq and A. Delchambre (2004). Création d'un espace conceptuel par analyse de données contextuelles. Proceedings of JADT 2004, pp. 682-691. Louvain-La-Neuve, Belgium.
- D. Wartel, P. Francq and A. Delchambre (2004). Organisation d'une masse documentaire électronique présentée à des lecteurs potentiels. Proceedings of JADT 2004, pp. 1185-1194. Louvain-La-Neuve, Belgium.
- P. Francq (2003). Structured and Collaborative Search: An integrated approach to share documents among users, PhD thesis, Université Libre de Bruxelles.
- M. Paternostre, P. Francq, J. Lamoral, D. Wartel and M. Saerens (2002). Carry, un algorithme de désuffixation pour le français. Technical report, Université Libre de Bruxelles.