About Us

LATECE (pronounced “la-tess”) is a transdisciplinary, collaborative environment focused on research and solution building.

LATECE goes beyond merely identifying the societal issues raised by its projects; it makes its name by addressing these issues using a responsive solution-building approach.

LATECE’s work is led by its researchers and further driven by the contributions of its students, postdoctoral fellows and industrial partners.

The lab itself is led by an executive committee, a scientific committee, and a strategic council.

Current membership composition:

History

LATECE was founded over 20 years ago now. The lab was established during the 2001-2002 academic year under UQAM’s Faculty of Science thanks to project-based funding from the Fondation UQAM.

At the time, its founding members —Omar Cherkaoui, PhD, Robert Godin, PhD, Hakim Lounis, PhD, Hafedh Mili, PhD and Rokia Missaoui, PhD— were all members of the Computer Science Department and the Research Lab on Knowledge Acquisition and Representation (Laboratoire de recherches sur l’acquisition et la representation des connaissances). This focus on knowledge acquisition began to evolve as part of a quest to find an emerging discipline common to all founding members. This ultimately evolved towards e-commerce. The lab was subsequently renamed Research Lab on E-Commerce Technologies (Laboratoire de recherche sur les technologies de commerce électronique), or LATECE. This was the first iteration of the LATECE that exists today.

In 2005, the lab was granted the status of Faculty Research Team by UQAM, which provided base funding and a teaching release for its founding director, Hafedh Mili, PhD.

In 2012, the lab became a UQAM emerging institutional research centre. This gave it a mandate to develop research or drive creation in its field1.

In 2020, thanks to a number of LATECE members belonging to the strategic research group STARaCom (Centre for Systems, Technologies and Applications for Radiofrequency and Communications, funded by the Fonds de recherche du Québec – Nature et technologies, or FRQNT), the lab officially became a STARaCom satellite unit. STARaCom is a leader in collaborative research on information and communications technology (ICT) in Quebec.

In 2020, LATECE established its strategic council composed of users and researchers with the necessary background to assess the strategic issues most relevant to the lab’s work. The deliberations of this council led the lab to turn its focus on eHealth, a field at the crossroads of a myriad of disciplines in technology, health, and applied AI, not to mention numerous and highly relevant societal issues such as population health (including costs related to preventable chronic diseases) as well as equity and inclusion, healthy behaviours, and privacy. Issues related to data security and the protection of personal information and privacy therefore also fell into the scope of LATECE’s work.

Over the last twenty years, the lab has moved more and more towards a transdisciplinary approach that naturally evolved from its projects and that has now come to define it. As such, the lab has since become the Transdisciplinary Research Lab on Computer Science Ecosystems (Laboratoire des recherches transdisciplinaire sur les écosystèmes informatiques).

  1. Per UQAM’s Policy #10 https://instances.uqam.ca/wp-content/uploads/sites/47/2018/05/Politique_no_10.pdf ↩︎