Fabien Girardin
Co-founder of Lift lab, Barcelona

Fabien Girardin is a researcher and engineer at Lift lab, a research agency he co-founded. He is fascinated by the interplay between urban infrastructures, ubiquitous technologies and people practices. His research mixes qualitative observations with quantitative data analysis to gain insights from the integration and appropriation of technologies in urban environments. Subsequently, he exploits the gained knowledge with engineering techniques to foresee and prototype ideas and solutions for designers, urban service providers, city planners and decision makers.

Fabien holds a Ph.D. degree in Computer Science and Digital Communications from Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, Spain (see full list of publications) and an engineering degree from the Biel School of Engineering and Information Technology, Switzerland. Along his academic journey, Fabien was also affiliated with the Senseable City Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Boston, USA to lead the development of analysis methods of real-time and historical aggregated spatio-temporal records to improve the understanding of different aspects of human mobility and urban attractiveness. Prior to his graduate studies, he joined the CRAFT at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technologies, Lausanne (EPFL) to design, implement, and study location-aware collaborative applications. Subsequently, Fabien co-founded Simpliquity, an EPFL spin-off to design and develop of mobility detection systems for mobile phones to perform context-aware experience sampling surveys on a world-wide scale.

Fabien speaks and lectures widely in conferences such as Lift, Picnic, Visualizar, Mobile Monday (see full list of talks). His blog about the domains of mobility, urban environments, and infrastructure-human interaction is called 7.5th Floor.