Robert WestRobert West is a tenure-track assistant professor of computer science at EPFL, where he heads the Data Science Lab. In his research, he develops and applies techniques in machine learning, computational social science, natural language processing, social network analysis, and data mining. Bob also collaborates closely with the Wikimedia Foundation, in his role as a Wikimedia Research Fellow. Bob’s work has won several awards, including best/outstanding paper awards at ICWSM’21, ICWSM’19, and WWW’13, a best-paper runner-up award at WWW’16, a Google Faculty Research Award, a Facebook Research Award, a Hewlett-Packard Graduate Fellowship, and a Facebook Graduate Fellowship. He is actively involved in the research community, e.g., as an Associate Editor of ICWSM and EPJ Data Science and as a co-founder of the Wiki Workshop (held at WWW and ICWSM) and the Applied Machine Learning Days. Bob received his PhD in Computer Science from Stanford University, his MSc from McGill University, Canada, and his undergraduate degree from Technische Universität München, Germany.[Last updated: 25 Aug 2021]
Marcel SalathéTeaching & PhD PhD Students Laura Espinosa Montalbán, Marouane Toumi, Rohan Singh Past EPFL PhD Students Gianrocco Lazzari, Martin Mathias Müller, Sharada Prasanna Mohanty Courses Digital epidemiology BIO-512 Epidemiology is foundational to medicine and public health. This course starts with the key principles of classical epidemiology, progressing through computational modeling techniques, and concluding with the digital approaches of today. Students will also develop a digital epidemiolo
Alexandre Massoud AlahiAlexandre Alahi is currently an Assistant Professor at EPFL. He spent five years at Stanford University as a Post-doc and Research Scientist after obtaining his Ph.D. from EPFL. His research enables machines to perceive the world and make decisions in the context of transportation problems and smart environments. He has worked on the theoretical challenges and practical applications of socially-aware Artificial Intelligence, i.e., systems equipped with perception and social intelligence. He was awarded the Swiss NSF early and advanced researcher grants for his work on predicting human social behavior. He won the CVPR Open Source Award (2012) for his work on Retina-inspired image descriptors, and the ICDSC Challenge Prize (2009) for his sparsity-driven algorithm that has tracked more than 100 million pedestrians to date. His research has been covered internationally by BBC, abc, PBS, Euronews, Wall street journal, and other national news outlets around the world. Alexandre has also co-founded multiple startups such as Visiosafe, and won several startup competitions. He was elected as one of the Top 20 Swiss Venture leaders in 2010.
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.
Patrick ThiranPatrick Thiran is a full professor in network and systems theory at the School of Computer and Communication Sciences at EPFL. He holds an electrical engineering degree from the Université Catholique de Louvain, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium, an M.Sc. degree in electrical engineering from the University of California at Berkeley, USA, and he received the PhD degree from EPFL, in 1996. He became an adjunct professor in 1998, an assistant professor in 2002, an associate professor in 2006 and a full professor in 2011. He was with Sprint Advanced Technology Labs in Burlingame, California, in 2000-01.
His research interests are in communication and social networks, performance analysis and stochastic models. He is currently active in the analysis and design of wireless and PLC networks (scaling laws, medium access control), in network monitoring (network tomography, multi-layer networks), and data-driven network science. He also contributed to network calculus and to the theory of locally coupled neural networks and self-organizing maps.
He served as an associate editor for the IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems in 1997-99 and for the IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking in 2006-10. He is currently on the editorial board of the IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communication. He is/was on the program committee of different conferences in networking, including ACM Sigcomm, Sigmetrics, IMC, CoNext and IEEE Infocom. He was TPC chair of AMC IMC 2011 and CoNext 2012. He is a Fellow of the Belgian American Educational Foundation and of the IEEE. He received the 1996 EPFL Doctoral Prize and the 2008 Crédit Suisse Teaching Award.
Devis TuiaI come from Ticino and studied in Lausanne, between UNIL and EPFL. After my PhD at UNIL in remote sensing, I was postdoc in Valencia (Spain), Boulder (CO) and EPFL, working on model adaptation and prior knowledge integration in machine learning. In 2014 I became Research Assistant Professor at University of Zurich, where I started the 'multimodal remote sensing' group. In 2017, I joined Wageningen University (NL), where I was professor of the GeoInformation Science and Remote Sensing Laboratory. Since 2020, I joined EPFL Valais, to start the ECEO lab, working at the interface between Earth observation, machine learning and environmental sciences.
Pierre DillenbourgA former teacher in elementary school, Pierre Dillenbourg graduated in educational science (University of Mons, Belgium). He started his research on learning technologies in 1984. In 1986, he has been on of the first in the world to apply machine learning to develop a self-improving teaching system. He obtained a PhD in computer science from the University of Lancaster (UK), in the domain of artificial intelligence applications for education. He has been assistant professor at the University of Geneva. He joined EPFL in 2002. He has been the director of Center for Research and Support on Learning and its Technologies, then academic director of Center for Digital Education, which implements the MOOC strategy of EPFL (over 2 million registrations). He is full professor in learning technologies in the School of Computer & Communication Sciences, where he is the head of the CHILI Lab: "Computer-Human Interaction for Learning & Instruction ». He is the director of the leading house DUAL-T, which develops technologies for dual vocational education systems (carpenters, florists,...). With EPFL colleagues, he launched in 2017 the Swiss EdTech Collider, an incubator with 80 start-ups in learning technologies. He (co-)-founded 4 start-ups, does consulting missions in the corporate world and joined the board of several companies or institutions. In 2018, he co-founded LEARN, the EPFL Center of Learning Sciences that brings together the local initiatives in educational innovation. He is a fellow of the International Society for Learning Sciences. He currently is the Associate Vice-President for Education at EPFL.
Petr MotlicekTeaching & PhD PhD Students Shashi Kumar Past EPFL PhD Students as codirector Subhadeep Dey, Weipeng He, Juan Pablo Zuluaga Gomez Courses Digital Speech and Audio Coding EE-719 The goal of this course is to introduce the engineering students state-of-the-art speech and audio coding techniques with an emphasis on the integration of knowledge about sound production and auditory perception through signal processing techniques.
Viktor KuncakViktor Kunčak joined EPFL in 2007, after receiving a PhD degree from MIT. Since then has been leading the Laboratory for Automated Reasoning and Analysis and supervised at least 12 completed PhD theses. His works on languages, algorithms and systems for verification and automated reasoning. He served as an initiator and one of the coordinators of a European network (COST action) in the area of automated reasoning, verification, and synthesis. In 2012 he received a 5-year single-investigator European Research Council (ERC) grant of 1.5M EUR. His invited talks include those at Lambda Days, Scala Days, NFM, LOPSTR, SYNT, ICALP, CSL, RV, VMCAI, and SMT. A paper on test generation he co-authored received an ACM SIGSOFT distinguished paper award at ICSE. A PLDI paper he co-authored was published in the Communications of the ACM as a Research Highlight article. His Google Scholar profile reports an over-approximate H-index of 38. He was an associate editor of ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems (TOPLAS) and served as a co-chair of conferences on Computer-Aided Verification (CAV), Formal Methods in Computer Aided Design (FMCAD), Workshop on Synthesis (SYNT), and Verification, Model Checking, and Abstract Interpretation (VMCAI). At EPFL he teaches courses on functional and parallel programming, compilers, and verification. He has co-taught the MOOC "Parallel Programming" that was visited by over 100'000 learners and completed by thousands of students from all over the world.
Martin JaggiMartin Jaggi is a Tenure Track Assistant Professor at EPFL, heading the Machine Learning and Optimization Laboratory. Before that, he was a post-doctoral researcher at ETH Zurich, at the Simons Institute in Berkeley, and at École Polytechnique in Paris. He has earned his PhD in Machine Learning and Optimization from ETH Zurich in 2011, and a MSc in Mathematics also from ETH Zurich.
Denis GilletDenis Gillet received the Diploma in Electrical Engineering from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL) in 1988, and the Ph.D. degree in Information Systems also from the EPFL in 1995. During 1992 he was appointed as Research Fellow at the Information Systems Laboratory of Stanford University in the United States. He is currently Maître d'enseignement et de recherche at the EPFL School of Engineering, where he leads the React research group. His current research interests include Technologies Enhanced Learning (TEL), Human Computer Interaction (HCI), Human Devices Interaction (HDI) and Optimal Coordination of Complex and Distributed Systems. Denis Gillet is affiliated at EPFL with the Center for Intelligent Systems and the Center for Digital Education.
Sandy IngramExpertise
Programming Languages (C, SQL, Ruby, Rails, Java, Javascript)Recommendation algorithmsSocial media design for collaborative work
Sandy's research is mainly focused on the design and development of Personal Learning Environments and contextual recommender systems. Currently working on the Jumpers CTI project.Also involved in the STELLAR Network of Excellence in Technology Enhanced Learning(EU, FP7). Among other things, she chaired the program for JTEL Winter School 2011.Worked on the ROLE Project (
Alexander MathisAlexander studied pure mathematics with a minor in logic and theory of science at the Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich. For his PhD also at LMU, he worked on optimal coding approaches to elucidate the properties of grid cells. As a postdoctoral fellow with Prof. Venkatesh N. Murthy at Harvard University and Prof. Matthias Bethge at Tuebingen AI, he decided to study olfactory behaviors such as odor-guided navigation, social behaviors and the cocktail party problem in mice. During this time, he increasingly got interested sensorimotor behaviors beyond olfaction and started working on proprioception, motor adaption, as well as computer vision tools for measuring animal behavior.
In his group, he is interested in elucidating how the brain gives rise to adaptive behavior. One of the major goals is to synthesize large datasets into computationally useful information. For those purposes, he develops algorithms and systems to analyze animal behavior (e.g. DeepLabCut), neural data, as well as creates experimentally testable computational models.
Valentin Alexandre Guy GabeffRechercheWildAI WildAI is an interdisciplinary project that aims to bring together behavioral neurosciences, ecology, environmental computational sciences, computer vision and machine learning to scale up conservation research. From unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) and camera trap (CT) acquired images, we seek to model the wildlife habitats in the Swiss National Park to complement ecological knowledge of how wildlife interacts with its environment and how perturbations in the environment can in turn affect w
Sven Nicolas Yoann Najem-MeyerExpertise
Sven Najem-Meyer is a Doctoral Assistant at the Digital Humanities Laboratory, working at the frontier between machine learning and classics. His research interests mainly lie in natural language processing, with a focus on domain-specific transfer learning strategies. Before joining the DHLAB, he studied cognitive sciences, logic and philosophy. He gained experience in NLP at the Laboratoire d'Informatique de Grenoble, working in patent classification.As part of the SNF-funded project Ajax MultiC
Martin Alois RohrmeierTeaching & PhD PhD Students Joris Monnet, Marina Borsodi-Benson, Xinyi Guan, Xiaoxuan Wang, Zeng Ren Past EPFL PhD Students Fabian Claude Moss, Daniel Harasim, Christoph Finkensiep, Johannes Hentschel, Gabriele Cecchetti, Shuxin Meng Courses Digital musicology DH-401 This course will introduce students to the central topics in digital musicology and core theoretical approaches and methods. In the practical part, students will carry out a practical project. Musical theory and creativity
