Nantes Université · LS2N

Pascal Molli

Full Professor in Computer Science at Nantes Université, France, and member of the GDD team at LS2N.

UFR de Sciences et Techniques · 2, rue de la Houssinière · BP 92208 · 44322 Nantes Cedex 3, France
+33 2 51 12 58 10 · Office 34-401

Profile

Professor Pascal Molli is Full Professor of Computer Science at Nantes University, a member of LS2N and a member of GDD team.

He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Universite Henri Poincare, Nancy 1, in 1996, and his Habilitation a Diriger des Recherches in 2007. From 1997 to 2010, he was Associate Professor at Universite Henri Poincare, Nancy. He contributed to the creation of the INRIA ECOO project in 1998 and served as its permanent head from 2001 to 2009. In 2009, he created and led the INRIA SCORE team. He joined the University of Nantes as Full Professor in 2010, where he led the GDD team on Distributed Data Management from 2010 to 2021.

His research lies at the intersection of distributed systems, databases, the Semantic Web and knowledge graphs. His early work focused on distributed collaborative systems, optimistic replication, consistency of shared data, and awareness models for collaborative editing. His recent work addresses large-scale and decentralized knowledge graph querying, Web preemption, SPARQL continuation queries, approximate and federated query processing, and the interaction between knowledge graphs and large language models through neuro-symbolic approaches.

Professor Molli has published more than 80 journal and conference papers in software engineering, information systems, distributed systems, computer-supported cooperative work, databases and the Semantic Web. He has supervised 16 Ph.D. theses and currently supervises or co-supervises three doctoral students. He has served on more than 70 program committees, including major international conferences such as The Web Conference, ISWC and ESWC.

He has been involved in numerous national and European research projects, including Libresource, XWiki-Concerto, Concordant, STREAMS, Socioplug, O’Browser and the European FP6 project Qualipso. He coordinated the ANR Kolflow project and the Labex CominLabs Descent project. More recently, he contributed to DeKaloG and Mikrolog, coordinates the ANR MeKaNo project on searching the Web with concepts, and is work-package leader in the ANR SaFE-KG project on secure federations of knowledge graphs.

Since 2020, he has served as Deputy Director of Labex CominLabs. Since 2022, he has been Head of the Master in Computer Science at Nantes University, and since 2021 he has been responsible for the Smart Computing Graduate Program, opened to students in 2024 within the SFRI Triton initiative.