Our Projects

JUSTSAFE “Justice-Oriented Strategies for Social Adaptive Risk Management”. The JUSTSAFE project, is a Horizon Innovation Action funded by the European Union. The project, which involves 25 partners from 12 countries and a total budget exceeding €7 million, runs for 48 months (2025-2029). It aims to develop just and inclusive climate resilience solutions across Europe. UGA has the role to develop human behaviour models for insertion into digital twins and to develop a serious game for vulnerable communities facing the consequences of climate change.

ATLAS Studying symbiotic scenarios linking Heritage assets and green areas to prepare Historic Cities to face Climate Changes. Funded by ANR CCH 2023 (Belmont funding with Universidad Pablo de Olavide and Ca’ Foscari University of Venice) for around 845k€ (300k€ UGA). The project runs from May 2024 to May 2027. Climate change (CC) is triggering dangerous temperature increases, floods, droughts, and fires in historic cities and their environments, which affect citizens’ and cultural heritage (CH) health. ATLAS employs interdisciplinary approaches and digital technologies for 1) modelling the scenarios of CC risks in Historic Cities, 2) managing Immovable CH and Green Infrastructure and, 3) predicting potential impacts. ATLAS tools based on satellite imagery, Geographic Information Systems, opinion of citizen managers, and human behaviour computational simulations, allow us to assess CC risk and look for the best resilience solution. UGA designs and implements an agent-based simulator to assess coordinated response strategies in the case of a forest fire in the area of Grenoble (specifically the area around the highly wooded area of the Bastille, a popular tourist attraction that is an ancient fort and cultural landmark, including several important museums.)

Plateformes. Digital platforms – A distributed architecture of data and services to support the implementation of risk scenarios). (Plateformes numériques – Une architecture distribuée de données et de services concourant à la mise en œuvre de scénarios de risques). Funded by PEPR Risques (IRiMa) for 7 300 000 € the project runs from 0101/2024 to 31/12/2030. The goal of the project is to design a service infrastructure to provide the scientific community concerned with shared modelling, analysis and mapping resources for developing risk scenarios. The project is coordinated by BRGM and involves: Université Nice Côte d’Azur, Université Grenoble Alpes, INRAE, CNRS, INERIS, and IRSN. UGA and Université Nice Côte d’Azur lead WP2 concerning delivering the platform’s various functional bricks. These bricks either already exist and need upgrading, or will need to be developed, initially targeting generic functionalities, and subsequently more targeted functionalities in response to the Use cases identified in WP3.

TwinNaTech “Digital twin dedicated to Natural and Technological cascading crisis management in the city of Grenoble” is funded by the MIAI Institute for 400k and runs from 2025-2029. Climate change effects and anthropisation have increased risks from natural and technological (NaTech) hazards. Anticipating/responding to crises is challenging for crisis managers, who can be supported by intelligent digital tools. Using a multidisciplinary and co-creation approach, we will develop an innovative next-generation digital twin (DT) for managing NaTech cascading crisis, focusing on population evacuation and health system response strategies, with strong involvement of local stakeholders. The DT will incorporate a priori and real-time data, (employing innovative distributed acoustic sensing), and surrogate/reduced order models (including human-behaviour models). UGA is the co-leader of this project and is involved in developing human behaviour models to add to the digital twin.

TrIA-Soc “Transformative AI & Social Change”. The project is funded by the MIAI Institute and runs from 2025-2029.  It aims to explore the societal impact of AI, focusing on its transformative effects at the individual, group, and community levels. TrAI-SoC will model, design, and evaluate the impact of adaptive AI-based Socially Interactive Agents (SIA) and serious games on eating habits. UGA is involved in developing serious games that promote behaviors that benefit individual health and the planet by engaging users in interactive experiences. The serious game uses an agent-based approach, modelling and tracking individual users’ choices over the long-term and educating them on their eating behaviours.

PRISAC  “Pedestrian Risk Integrated Simulation with an Autonomous Car”. The project is funded by IDEX RI from 2025 to 2028 and involves UGA (PACTE and LIG labs as PIs), IRIT, and the University of Tsukuba, Japan. In dense and dynamic urban environments such as shared spaces autonomous vehicles (Avs) will have to navigate among pedestrians. A key challenge towards the harmonious integration of AVs in public spaces is managing risk perception. This project investigates risk perception and the associated behaviours of pedestrians and passengers during pedestrians-AV interactions. The subject will be addressed from the perspective of the pedestrian at University Grenoble Alps (UGA) and from the perspective of the AV passenger at University of Tsukuba. The two PhD students will jointly investigate two main research questions: 1. How does risk perception affect the behaviour of the pedestrians around the AV and the passenger in the AV? 2. Can we develop a risk classification scheme linking risk perception to behaviours during pedestrians-AV interactions?

RISK@UGA and the Risk Institute. https://risk.univ-grenoble-alpes.fr/risk-institute-home-738035.kjsp Risk@UGA was initially funded by the IDEX CDP 2017 to 2022 and then the Risk Institute, a follow-on project, received funding from IDEX CDTools from 2022 to 2027. I am the Referent for LIG and co-responsible for a research cluster on Telluric crises and risks that uses multi-agent modelling and simulation. The RISK project aims to develop interdisciplinary and scientific innovations in the field of risk and disaster management in vulnerable regions due to a strong interdependence of human, natural or technological hazards. Through this project, we obtained both funding for a doctoral student (who worked on agent-based human behaviour modelling in earthquake situations in Beirut) and funding for a post-doctorate (who worked on agent-based human behaviour modelling in flash flood situations). This work is undertaken in collaboration with PACTE (Laboratory of Social Sciences), ISTERRE (Institute of Earth Sciences), and IGE (Laboratory of Geo-Sciences of the Environment).

Frontlet (Permanents: Philippe). The Lethal Borders (FrontLet) project https://www.pacte-grenoble.fr/fr/recherche-0/projets-recherche/frontieres-letales-frontlet is an IRGA project (May 2024-April 2027). The main objective is to facilitate the collection of information and the analysis of data on migrants who have died at the borders of the European Union or during their journey from one EU country to another, through the development of high-performance collaborative tools. Currently, the data on border deaths comes from civil society initiatives (researchers, associations) and is acquired without a harmonised protocol or common tool, which hinders its sharing and analysis. FrontLet aims to overcome these obstacles by developing a harmonised database and a data collection, analysis and representation interface. In this context, Philippe Genoud is in charge of defining a data model for defining migrant trajectories, operationalising it using an RDF knowledge graph and using it via a web application (for consulting data and for collaborative data acquisition).

High Impact is financed by Halias for around 160k€. It is based on the platform of the same name that is developed by Halias https://high-impact.fr/. This environmental monitoring platform enables users to store data and use it to check that the environmental impact of its beneficiaries (industrial operators, infrastructure managers or managers of natural areas) remains controllable. The platform is designed to be general-purpose, covering a number of themes (acoustics/vibration, air, water (chemistry, bacteriology), biodiversity). The project aims to semantise the data and control flow of this platform in order to optimise information management and the choice of calculation processes to be applied, and to anticipate changes in environmental impacts by minimising them. The conceptual and technological solutions for this semantisation remain research challenges based in particular on the use of ontologies, making it possible to interoperate the stream of heterogeneous data and optimise decision-making in the control stream, as well as the use of reinforcement learning algorithms to enable decision-making to evolve.