Dario FloreanoProf. Dario Floreano is director of the Laboratory of Intelligent Systems at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL). Since 2010, he is the founding director of the Swiss National Center of Competence in Robotics, a research program that brings together more than 20 labs across Switzerland. Prof. Floreano holds an M.A. in Vision, an M.S. in Neural Computation, and a PhD in Robotics. He has held research positions at Sony Computer Science Laboratory, at Caltech/JPL, and at Harvard University. His main research interests are Robotics and A.I. at the convergence of biology and engineering. Prof. Floreano made pioneering contributions to the fields of evolutionary robotics, aerial robotics, and soft robotics. He served in numerous advisory boards and committees, including the Future and Emerging Technologies division of the European Commission, the World Economic Forum Agenda Council, the International Society of Artificial Life, the International Neural Network Society, and in the editorial committee of several scientific journals. In addition, he helped spinning off two drone companies (senseFly.com and Flyability.com) and a non-for-profit portal on robotics and A.I. (RoboHub.org). Books
Manuale sulle Reti Neurali, il Mulino (in Italian), 1996 (first edition), 2006 (second edition)Evolutionary Robotics, MIT Press, 2000
Bio-Inspired Artificial Intelligence, MIT Press, 2008
Flying Insects and Robots, Springer Verlag, 2010
Henry MarkramHenry Markram started a dual scientific and medical career at the University of Cape Town, in South Africa. His scientific work in the 80s revealed the polymodal receptive fields of pontomedullary reticular formation neurons in vivo and how acetylcholine re-organized these sensory maps.
He moved to Israel in 1988 and obtained his PhD at the Weizmann Institute where he discovered a link between acetylcholine and memory mechanisms by being the first to show that acetylcholine modulates the NMDA receptor in vitro studies, and thereby gates which synapses can undergo synaptic plasticity. He was also the first to characterize the electrical and anatomical properties of the cholinergic neurons in the medial septum diagonal band.
He carried out a first postdoctoral study as a Fulbright Scholar at the NIH, on the biophysics of ion channels on synaptic vesicles using sub-fractionation methods to isolate synaptic vesicles and patch-clamp recordings to characterize the ion channels. He carried out a second postdoctoral study at the Max Planck Institute, as a Minerva Fellow, where he discovered that individual action potentials propagating back into dendrites also cause pulsed influx of Ca2 into the dendrites and found that sub-threshold activity could also activated a low threshold Ca2 channel. He developed a model to show how different types of electrical activities can divert Ca2 to activate different intracellular targets depending on the speed of Ca2 influx an insight that helps explain how Ca2 acts as a universal second messenger. His most well known discovery is that of the millisecond watershed to judge the relevance of communication between neurons marked by the back-propagating action potential. This phenomenon is now called Spike Timing Dependent Plasticity (STDP), which many laboratories around the world have subsequently found in multiple brain regions and many theoreticians have incorporated as a learning rule. At the Max-Planck he also started exploring the micro-anatomical and physiological principles of the different neurons of the neocortex and of the mono-synaptic connections that they form - the first step towards a systematic reverse engineering of the neocortical microcircuitry to derive the blue prints of the cortical column in a manner that would allow computer model reconstruction.
He received a tenure track position at the Weizmann Institute where he continued the reverse engineering studies and also discovered a number of core principles of the structural and functional organization such as differential signaling onto different neurons, models of dynamic synapses with Misha Tsodyks, the computational functions of dynamic synapses, and how GABAergic neurons map onto interneurons and pyramidal neurons. A major contribution during this period was his discovery of Redistribution of Synaptic Efficacy (RSE), where he showed that co-activation of neurons does not only alter synaptic strength, but also the dynamics of transmission. At the Weizmann, he also found the tabula rasa principle which governs the random structural connectivity between pyramidal neurons and a non-random functional connectivity due to target selection. Markram also developed a novel computation framework with Wolfgang Maass to account for the impact of multiple time constants in neurons and synapses on information processing called liquid computing or high entropy computing.
In 2002, he was appointed Full professor at the EPFL where he founded and directed the Brain Mind Institute. During this time Markram continued his reverse engineering approaches and developed a series of new technologies to allow large-scale multi-neuron patch-clamp studies. Markrams lab discovered a novel microcircuit plasticity phenomenon where connections are formed and eliminated in a Darwinian manner as apposed to where synapses are strengthening or weakened as found for LTP. This was the first demonstration that neural circuits are constantly being re-wired and excitation can boost the rate of re-wiring.
At the EPFL he also completed the much of the reverse engineering studies on the neocortical microcircuitry, revealing deeper insight into the circuit design and built databases of the blue-print of the cortical column. In 2005 he used these databases to launched the Blue Brain Project. The BBP used IBMs most advanced supercomputers to reconstruct a detailed computer model of the neocortical column composed of 10000 neurons, more than 340 different types of neurons distributed according to a layer-based recipe of composition and interconnected with 30 million synapses (6 different types) according to synaptic mapping recipes. The Blue Brain team built dozens of applications that now allow automated reconstruction, simulation, visualization, analysis and calibration of detailed microcircuits. This Proof of Concept completed, Markrams lab has now set the agenda towards whole brain and molecular modeling.
With an in depth understanding of the neocortical microcircuit, Markram set a path to determine how the neocortex changes in Autism. He found hyper-reactivity due to hyper-connectivity in the circuitry and hyper-plasticity due to hyper-NMDA expression. Similar findings in the Amygdala together with behavioral evidence that the animal model of autism expressed hyper-fear led to the novel theory of Autism called the Intense World Syndrome proposed by Henry and Kamila Markram. The Intense World Syndrome claims that the brain of an Autist is hyper-sensitive and hyper-plastic which renders the world painfully intense and the brain overly autonomous. The theory is acquiring rapid recognition and many new studies have extended the findings to other brain regions and to other models of autism.
Markram aims to eventually build detailed computer models of brains of mammals to pioneer simulation-based research in the neuroscience which could serve to aggregate, integrate, unify and validate our knowledge of the brain and to use such a facility as a new tool to explore the emergence of intelligence and higher cognitive functions in the brain, and explore hypotheses of diseases as well as treatments.
Lenka ZdeborováLenka Zdeborová is a Professor of Physics and of Computer Science in École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne where she leads the Statistical Physics of Computation Laboratory. She received a PhD in physics from University Paris-Sud and from Charles University in Prague in 2008. She spent two years in the Los Alamos National Laboratory as the Director's Postdoctoral Fellow. Between 2010 and 2020 she was a researcher at CNRS working in the Institute of Theoretical Physics in CEA Saclay, France. In 2014, she was awarded the CNRS bronze medal, in 2016 Philippe Meyer prize in theoretical physics and an ERC Starting Grant, in 2018 the Irène Joliot-Curie prize, in 2021 the Gibbs lectureship of AMS. She is an editorial board member for Journal of Physics A, Physical Review E, Physical Review X, SIMODS, Machine Learning: Science and Technology, and Information and Inference. Lenka's expertise is in applications of concepts from statistical physics, such as advanced mean field methods, replica method and related message-passing algorithms, to problems in machine learning, signal processing, inference and optimization. She enjoys erasing the boundaries between theoretical physics, mathematics and computer science.
Maria ColomboTeaching & PhD PhD Students Roberto Colombo, Antonio Tirotta, Carl Johan Peter Johansson, Giulia Mescolini Past EPFL PhD Students Luigi De Rosa, Silja Noëmi Aline Haffter, Massimo Sorella Courses Analysis IV - Lebesgue measure, Fourier analysis MATH-205 Learn the basis of Lebesgue integration and Fourier analysis Topics on the Euler and Navier-Stokes equations MATH-647 This topics course focuses on recent and classical fundamental results on the Euler and Navier-Stokes equa
Lénaïc ChizatTeaching & PhD PhD Students Javier Esteban Maass Martinez Past EPFL PhD Students Guillaume Yitian Wang Courses Computational optimal transport MATH-528 Computational aspects of measure transportation, from classical optimal transport to modern denoising diffusion models. Topics in machine learning MATH-520 Mathematical analysis of modern supervised machine learning techniques, with an emphasis on the mathematics of artificial neural networks.
Xavier Fernandez-Real GironaTeaching & PhD PhD Students Roberto Colombo Courses Optimal transport MATH-476 The first part is devoted to Monge and Kantorovitch problems, discussing the existence and the properties of the optimal plan. The second part introduces the Wasserstein distance on measures and develops applications of optimal transport to PDEs, functional/geometric inequalities, traffic models.
Drazen DujicDrazen Dujic is an Associate Professor and Head of the Power Electronics Laboratory at EPFL. He received the Dipl.Ing. and MSc degrees from the University of Novi Sad, Serbia in 2002 and 2005, respectively, and the PhD degree from Liverpool John Moores University, UK in 2008. From 2003 to 2006, he was a Research Assistant with the Faculty of Technical Sciences at University of Novi Sad. From 2006 to 2009, he was a Research Associate with Liverpool John Moores University. After that he moved to industry and joined ABB Switzerland Ltd, where from 2009 to 2013, he was Scientist and then Principal Scientist with ABB Corporate Research Center in Baden-Dättwil, and from 2013 to 2014 he was R&D Platform Manager with ABB Medium Voltage Drives in Turgi. He joined EPFL in 2014 as Tenure Track Assistant Professor and was promoted to Associate Professor in 2021. His research interests include the areas of design and control of advanced high power electronic systems and high-performance drives, predominantly for the medium voltage applications related to electrical energy generation, conversion and storage. He has authored or coauthored more than 150 scientific publications and has filed 16 patents. In 2018 he received EPE Outstanding Service Award from European Power Electronics and Drives Association and in 2014 the Isao Takahashi Power Electronics Award for Outstanding Achievement in Power Electronics. He is Senior Member of IEEE, and serves as Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Power Electronics, IEEE Transactions on Industrial Electronics and IET Electric Power Applications. He is Chairman of the Swiss IEEE Power Electronics Society (PELS) Chapter and IEEE PELS R8 Chair.
Philippe MüllhauptExpertise
Nonlinear Control (Geometry and Algebra)Classical DynamicsRoboticsStatistics
Mission
Provide rigorous technical and scientific training in nonlinear control, classical mechanics, and statistical theory
Current Work
Research and teaching in the fields of control theory, statistics, dynamical systems, and general mechanics.
Philippe Mullhaupt received his Diplôme d Education Ing�nieur | Electricit� 1993 – 1993 EPFL DEA | Automatique et Traitement du Signal 199
Sofia Charlotta OlhedeI am a professor of Statistics at EPFL. I did my PhD in Mathematics at Imperial College London, and graduated in 2003. I was an assistant professor (lecturer) at Imperial College London 2002-2006, and an associate professor (senior lecturer) 2006-2007. In 2007 I moved to University College London and became a full professor. I moved to EPFL in 2019, and in 2018 I became an Institute of Mathematical Statistics Fellow with citation “For seminal contributions to the theory and application of large and heteroge
Johanni Michael BreaTeaching & PhD PhD Students Aude Maier, Lucas Louis Gruaz, Flavio Martinelli Courses Artificial intelligence and society HUM-286 This course integrates social sciences and humanities with engineering sciences, and introduces students to the social, technical and political issues surrounding artificial intelligence. Biological data science II : machine learning BIO-322 Students understand basic concepts and methods of machine learning. They can describe them in mathematical
Maud EhrmannMaud Ehrmann is a research scientist at EPFL’s Digital Humanities Laboratory lead by Prof.
Frédéric Kaplan
. She holds a PhD in Computational Linguistics from the Paris Diderot Universtiy (Paris 7) and has been engaged in a large number of scientific projects centred on information extraction and text analysis, both for present-time and historical documents. Her main research interests span Natural Language Processing and Digital Humanities and include, among others, historical text annotation, historical data processing and representation, named entity recognition, and multilingual linguistic resources creation.
Her current work at the DHLAB focuses on
‘impresso - Media Monitoring of the Past’
, a SNF sinergia project she initiated with
Marten Düring
(
C2DH
) and
Simon Clematide
(
ICL
) and which aims at enabling critical analysis of historical newspapers. In addition to the overall project management, her contributions to this project include system design and data management, annotation and benchmarking and named entity processing. Besides, she participates to the activities of the
Venice Time Machine
, working particularly on information extraction and knowledge representation tasks. Previously, she worked on the
Garzoni
project where she supervised and contributed to the development of a web-based transcription and annotation interface - in collaboration with Orlin Topalov, and built a linked data-based historical knowledge base. She also contributed to the
Le Temps Digital Archives project
.
Prior to joining the DHLAB, she worked at the
Linguistics Computing Laboratory
at the Sapienza University of Rome with Roberto Navigli, where she worked on the
BabelNet
resource - a very large multilingual encyclopaedic dictionary and semantic network - and contributed to the
LIDER
project. Before that, she has been working for four years at the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre in Ispra, Italy, as member of the OPTIMA unit (now
Text and Data mining
unit), which develops innovative and application-oriented solutions for retrieving and extracting information from the Internet with a focus on high multilinguality. Together with Erik van der Goot,
Ralf Steinberger
, Hristo Tanev, Leo della Rocca and many others, she contributed to the development of the
Europe Media Monitor
(EMM). Prior, she worked at the Xerox Europe Research Centre in Grenoble, France (now
Naver Labs Europe
) in the Parsing & Semantics group led by Frédérique Segond, first as PhD candidate supported through a CIFRE grant under the supervision of
Caroline Brun
and
Bernard Victorri
, then as a post-doctoral researcher. There her research focused mainly on the automatic processing and fine-grained analysis of entities of interest, specifically named entities and temporal expressions.
