Engineer and Geographer, Stéphane Roche is a full professor of Geospatial sciences and vice-dean for research at the Faculty of forestry, geography and geomatics, Université Laval, Québec City, Canada. He teaches GIS and spatial analysis (undergraduate and graduate) and, a graduate seminar on Geospatial data quality. Roche is especially interested in exploring the role of social geolocation (LBSN), open data and crowdsourcing to support the implementation and operation of smart city concepts. He is also involved in research projects dealing with spatial skills and spatial reasoning as the main sources for a new form of urban intelligence.
Roche has contributed to the Ethics and Smart City Panel of the Commission for Ethics in Sciences and Technologies of the Governement of Québec. He has recently been selected as one of the 13 jury members for the Smart City Challenge of Infrastructure Canada Minister. Roche is an active member of the Information Technologies and Society Institute (ITIS - Université Laval) and of the Centre for Research in Geomatics (CRG – Université Laval). He is also a research affiliate to the MIT Senseable City Lab and Honorary Principal Fellow to the Department of Infrastructure Engineering at the University of Melbourne, Australia.