Chairholder | Quentin Bletery

Quentin Bletery is a geophysicist and a senior researcher at IRD. He is affiliated with IRD, CNRS, Observatoire de la Côte d’Azur and University Côte d’Azur. He works at Géoazur, in Sophia Antipolis. He leads the EARLI team, a research team funded by an ERC Starting Grant and an ERC Proof-of-Concept Grant to develop AI algorithms for earthquake and tsunami early warning. He is also a senior member of the Administration Board of the Observatoire de la Côte d’Azur and a senior member of the IRD scientific commission « Modeling and big data Science » in charge of recruiting, evaluating and promoting IRD researchers working in these fields.

Quentin Bletery and his team study different aspects of the seismic cycle through multiple geophysical datasets (GPS, seismic data, distributed acoustic sensing…) to both understand the physics of earthquakes and to anticipate them. To that end, they design AI algorithms to rapidly estimate the magnitude of large ongoing earthquakes from real-time data in order to forecast the intensity of the shakings and the amplitude of possible tsunamis as rapidly as possible (one of their algorithm has been implemented in the Peruvian earthquake early warning system, another one is currently being tested by Peru and Alaska for tsunami warning). They also design AI tools to search for hypothetical precursory signals in different geophysical datasets and to assess whether or not earthquakes may one day be predicted.