Ghislain Fourny

Ghislain Fourny is a lecturer and researcher with a focus on storing and querying XML and JSON data combined with a mathematical and formal background. He holds a Master of Science in Computer Science with the ETH Medal and a Doctorate of Science from ETH Zürich. Ghislain is a co-designer of the JSONiq language and was a member of the W3C XML Query working group from 2011 to 2014. He is a co-founder of the RumbleDB engine, which is a free and open-source implementation of JSONiq running on Apache Spark, and of the Brel Python library, which aims at providing a data independent access to XBRL data in Python. His other area of research is Non-Nashian Game Theory and its application to proving that Einstein was correct about the feasibility of extending quantum physics to a fully deterministic theory. Ghislain co-founded the Swiss-German chapter of the International Games and Logic Championship in 2007, which enabled the participation of children from the 3rd grade in German-speaking Switzerland and which has been growing every year since then. Ghislain currently teaches the courses Big Data, Information Systems for Engineers, and Information Retrieval at ETH Zurich, where he obtained a Golden Owl (teaching award) in 2020, the Credit Suisse Award for Best Teaching in 2022, and the VIS Teaching Award for Best Organisation in 2023.