Obituary by Emmanuelle Delsol, Le Monde Informatique
Rose Dieng-Kuntz, a researcher at Sophia Antipolis, died at age 52 as a result of disease. Specialist in artificial intelligence, she ran for several years the work on knowledge management and semantic web at INRIA. She was the first African woman admitted to the Ecole Polytechnique in 1976 and held a degree from ENST, a postgraduate degree in computer science and a PhD on the specification of parallelism. After debuting at Digital Equipment, she joined INRIA Sophia Antipolis to participate in projects of artificial intelligence in 1985.
Pierre Haren, ILOG founder, remembers “Rose Dieng since 1969, my first distribution of prizes in high school Van Vollenhoven in Dakar, where she won all the top prizes. [I] admired his meteoric trajectory that had not begun his modesty.” In 2005 Rose Dieng-Kuntz was awarded the Irène Joliot-Curie award for exceptional women scientists. The following year she was named Chevalier of the National Order of the Legion of Honor.
“A visionary and a huge talent”
I had the pleasure to interview Rose a few years ago and I keep the memory of a researcher who was exciting, friendly and a great joy. In a statement, the Minister of Higher Education and Research, Valérie Pécresse has expressed deep sadness at the death of Rose Dieng-Kuntz. “France and science have lost a visionary and a huge talent,” she added.