Fabien Girardin is a co-founder of the Near Future Laboratory a thinking, making, design, development and research practice speculating on the near future possibilities for digital worlds. He is active in the domains of user experience, data science and urban informatics.
In his practice he mixes qualitative observations with quantitative data analysis to gain insights from the integration and appropriation of technologies. Subsequently, he exploits the gained knowledge with engineering techniques to prototype and evaluate concepts and solutions for urban service providers and decision makers.
He also co-created the visual programming environment Quadrigram and now acts as Strategic and Conceptual Advisor supporting the management team in matching market demand with product specifications, orchestrating the user experience design and steering the technical developments.
Fabien holds a Ph.D. degree in Computer Science and Digital Communications from Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, Spain 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 network data 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 air-travel detection systems for mobile phones to perform context-aware experience sampling surveys.
Fabien speaks and lectures widely in conferences such as Strata, Lift, Picnic, Visualizar, Mobile Monday.