About

Hello, my name is Taïs Grippa and I am a researcher in Remote Sensing and Geomatics. My research activities mainly focus on using state-of-the-art and open-source GIS, remote sensing and machine learning solutions for mapping land cover and land use from very high resolution satellite imagery, modelling population density and produce geospatial analyses.

I studied human geography in my MSc at the Institute for Environmental Management and Land-use Planning (IGEAT) of the Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB). Then I wanted to specialize more in Geospatial and become a geomatician, so I followed a university certificate in Applied Geomatics at Université Catholique de Louvain (UCLouvain). My first professional experience was as a geography teacher in secondary school, but I quickly get a proposition to take up my first research position at ULB on a project aiming at developing a synoptic index to assess and compare the level of socio-economic difficulties of urban neighbourhoods in Belgium. In 2014, I started a PhD in remote sensing and geomatics on the MAUPP project. This project aimed at mapping land-cover and land-use from high and very-high resolution imagery and produce fine resolution grid-based population models. I defenitely learned a lot of things during these 4-years, including machine learning, Python programming, automated geospatial pipeline development with GIS tools, developping cutting-edge unsupervised OBIA approach but also project management in general, scientific publishing, etc… After the end of my PhD in 2019, I worked on several remote sensing and geospatial analysis projects but also acted as the research head of the ANAGEO lab during six months. Currently, I’m conducting my FNRS postdoctoral research on weak and semi-supervised methods for land cover semantic segmentation.

I have acquired many teaching experience since my graduation with full-time Geography teacher position in secondary school, second-teacher assistant for the remote sensing labs of GEOG-F-425 course at ULB, teaching geomatics (GPS, surveying, GIS, cartography) to Sub-saharan African trainees, teaching GEOBIA using GRASS GIS at ITC (UTwente) for the course of Prof. Kuffer, etc.
I’m also involved in the GRASS GIS developers community as a contributor on GRASS GIS add-on. Finally, I’m doing photography in my free time.