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
Jean-Marc OdobezExpertise
Computer Vision, machine Learning (Bayesian models, deep learning), multimodal processing.Activity analysis, human behavior understanding, human communication, interaction modeling
Dr Jean-Marc Odobez (Msc 1990, PhD 1994) received his Ph.D degree from Rennes University in 1994 for his PhD dissertation done at INRIA. After 5 years as an assistant professor at the University du Maine, France, he decided to join Idiap, where he is now the Head of the Perception & Activity Understanding Group and adju
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.
Francesco MondadaDr. Mondada received his M.Sc. in micro-engineering in 1991 and his Doctoral degree in 1997 at EPFL. During his thesis he co-founded the company K-Team, being both CEO and president of the company for about 5 years. He is one of the three main developers of the Khepera robot, considered as a standard in bio-inspired robotics and used by more than 1,000 universities and research centers worldwide. Fully back in research in 2000 and after a short period at CALTECH, he participated to the SWARM-BOTS project as the main developer of the s-bot robot platform, which was ranked on position 39 in the list of The 50 Best Robots Ever (fiction or real) by the Wired Journal in 2006. The SWARM-BOTS project was selected as FET-IST success story by the EU commission. He is author of more than 100 papers in the field of bio-inspired robotics and system level robot design. He is co-editor of several international conference proceedings. In November 2005 he received the EPFL Latsis University prize for his contributions to bio-inspired robotics. In 2011 he received the "Crédit Suisse Award for Best Teaching" from EPFL and in 2012 the "polysphère" award from the students as best teacher in the school of engineering. His interests include the development of innovative mechatronic solutions for mobile and modular robots, the creation of know-how for future embedded applications, and making robot platforms more accessible for education, research, and industrial development.
Simon Nessim HeneinBorn in 1973 and of Egyptian-Swiss nationality, Simon Henein grew up in Cairo. He obtained an engineering degree at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in 1996 and went on to complete his doctorate at the EPFL in 2000. In 2001, he published the book “Conception des guidages flexibles” which has become a reference in precision engineering. He then joined the Centre Suisse d’Electronique et Microtechnique (CSEM), Neuchatel, Switzerland, where he conceived and developed mechanisms for robotic, aerospace, medical and watchmaking applications. He pursued his research career at the Paul Scherrer Institute, Villigen, Switzerland, where he developed instruments for the Swiss Light Source Synchrotron (SLS). Since November 1st, 2012, he is associate professor in microengineering at the EPFL, holder of the Patek Philippe Chair and director of the Micromechanical and horological design laboratory (Instant-Lab).
Olivier LévêqueOlivier Lévêque was born in Switzerland in 1971. He received the physics diploma from EPFL in 1995 and completed his PhD in mathematics at EPFL in 2001. Since then, he has been with the Laboratory of Information Theory at EPFL. He spent the academical year 2005-2006 at the Electrical Engineering Department of Stanford University, where he was appointed as lecturer. His research interests include stochastic analysis, random matrices, wireless communications and information theory.
Martin VetterliMartin Vetterli was appointed president of EPFL by the Federal Council following a selection process conducted by the ETH Board, which unanimously nominated him.
Professor Vetterli was born on 4 October 1957 in Solothurn and received his elementary and secondary education in Neuchâtel Canton. He earned a Bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from ETH Zurich (ETHZ) in 1981, a Master’s of Science degree from Stanford University in 1982, and a PhD from EPFL in 1986. Professor Vetterli taught at Columbia University as an assistant and then associate professor. He was subsequently named full professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at the University of California at Berkeley before returning to EPFL as a full professor at the age of 38. He has also taught at ETHZ and Stanford University.
Professor Vetterli has earned numerous national and international awards for his research in electrical engineering, computer science and applied mathematics, including the National Latsis Prize in 1996. He is a fellow of both the Association for Computing Machinery and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and a member the US National Academy of Engineering. He has published over 170 articles and three reference works.
Professor Vetterli’s work on the theory of wavelets, which are used in signal processing, is considered to be of major importance by his peers, and his areas of expertise, including image and video compression and self-organized communication systems, are central to the development of new information technologies. As the founding director of the National Centre of Competence in Research on Mobile Information and Communication Systems, Professor Vetterli is a staunch advocate of transdisciplinary research.
Professor Vetterli knows EPFL inside and out. An EPFL graduate himself, he began been teaching at the school in 1995, was vice president for International Affairs and then Institutional Affairs from 2004 to 2011, and served as dean of the School of Computer and Communication Sciences in 2011 and 2012. In addition to his role as president of the National Research Council of the Swiss National Science Foundation, a position he held from 2013 to 2016, he heads the EPFL’s Audiovisual Communications Laboratory (LCAV) since 1995.
Professor Vetterli has supported more than 60 students in Switzerland and the United States in their doctoral work and makes a point of following their highly successful careers, whether it is in the academic or business world.
He is the author of some 50 patents, some of which were the basis for start-ups coming out of his lab, such as Dartfish and Illusonic, while others were sold (e.g. Qualcomm) as successful examples of technology transfer. He actively encourages young researchers to market the results of their work.
Volkan CevherVolkan Cevher received the B.Sc. (valedictorian) in electrical engineering from Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey, in 1999 and the Ph.D. in electrical and computer engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, GA in 2005. He was a Research Scientist with the University of Maryland, College Park from 2006-2007 and also with Rice University in Houston, TX, from 2008-2009. Currently, he is an Associate Professor at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne and a Faculty Fellow in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at Rice University. His research interests include machine learning, signal processing theory, optimization theory and methods, and information theory. Dr. Cevher is an ELLIS fellow and was the recipient of the Google Faculty Research award in 2018, the IEEE Signal Processing Society Best Paper Award in 2016, a Best Paper Award at CAMSAP in 2015, a Best Paper Award at SPARS in 2009, and an ERC CG in 2016 as well as an ERC StG in 2011.
Hervé BourlardTeaching & PhD Past EPFL PhD Students Astrid Hagen, Katrin Weber, Todd Stephenson, Jitendra Ajmera, Shajith Ikbal, Mathew Magimai Doss, Mohamed Faouzi Benzeghiba, Mark Barnard, Yann Rodriguez, Hemant Misra, Christos Dimitrakakis, Guillaume Lathoud, Alexei Pozdnoukhov, Agnès Just, Mikaela Keller, Norman Hoon Thian Poh, Dong Zhang, Florent Monay Michaud, Pedro Manuel Da Silva Quelhas, Kevin Smith, Silèye Oumar Ba, Bertrand Mesot, Hamed Ketabdar, David Grangier, Guillermo Aradilla, Jean-François Paiement, Nico
