Mohammad Amin ShokrollahiAmin Shokrollahi has worked on a variety of topics, including coding theory, computational number theory and algebra, and computational/algebraic complexity theory. He is best known for his work on iterative decoding algorithms of graph based codes, an area in which he holds a number of granted and pending patents. He is the co-inventor of Tornado codes, and the inventor of Raptor codes. His codes have been standardized and successfully deployed in practical areas dealing with data transmission over lossy networks.
Prior to joining EPFL, Amin Shokrollahi has held positions as the chief scientist of Digital Fountain, member of the technical staff at Bell Laboratories, senior researcher at the International Computer Science Insitute in Berkeley, and assistant professor at the department of computer science of the university of Bonn. He is a Fellow of the IEEE, and he was awarded the Best Paper Award of the IEEE IT Society in 2002 for his work on iterative decoding of LDPC code, the IEEE Eric Sumner Award in 2007 for the development of Fountain Codes, and the joint Communication Society/Information Theory Society best paper award of 2007 for his paper on Raptor Codes.
Michael Christoph GastparMichael Gastpar is a (full) Professor at EPFL. From 2003 to 2011, he was a professor at the University of California at Berkeley, earning his tenure in 2008.
He received his Dipl. El.-Ing. degree from ETH Zürich, Switzerland, in 1997 and his MS degree from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, IL, USA, in 1999. He defended his doctoral thesis at EPFL on Santa Claus day, 2002. He was also a (full) Professor at Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands.
His research interests are in network information theory and related coding and signal processing techniques, with applications to sensor networks and neuroscience.
He is a Fellow of the IEEE. He is the co-recipient of the 2013 Communications Society & Information Theory Society Joint Paper Award. He was an Information Theory Society Distinguished Lecturer (2009-2011). He won an ERC Starting Grant in 2010, an Okawa Foundation Research Grant in 2008, an NSF CAREER award in 2004, and the 2002 EPFL Best Thesis Award. He has served as an Associate Editor for Shannon Theory for the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory (2008-11), and as Technical Program Committee Co-Chair for the 2010 International Symposium on Information Theory, Austin, TX.
Nicolas MacrisNicolas Macris received the PhD degree in theoretical physics from EPFL and then pursued his scientific activity at the mathematics department of Rutgers University (NJ, USA). He then joined the Faculty of Basic Science of EPFL, working in the field of quantum statistical mechanics and mathematical aspects of the quantum Hall effect. Since 2005 he is with the Communication Theories Laboratory and Information Processing group of the School of Communication and Computer Science and currently works at the interface of statistical mechanics, information theory and error correcting codes, inference and learning theory. He held long-term visiting appointments and collaborations with the University College and the Institute of Advanced studies in Dublin, the Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon, the Centre de Physique Theorique Luminy Marseille, Paris XI Orsay, the ETH Zürich and more recently Los Alamos National Lab. CV and publication list.
Emre TelatarI. Emre Telatar received the B.Sc. degree in electrical engineering from the Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey, in 1986. He received the S.M. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering and computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, in 1988 and 1992 respectively. In 1992, he joined the Communications Analysis Research Department at AT&T Bell Laboratories (later Lucent Technologies), Murray Hill, NJ. He has been at the EPFL since 2000.
Emre Telatar was the recipient of the IEEE Information Theory Society Paper Award in 2001. He was a program co-chair for the IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory in 2002, and associate editor for Shannon Theory for the IEEE Information Theory Transactions from 2001 to 2004. He was awarded the EPFL Agepoly teaching prize in 2005.
Emre Telatar's research interests are in communication and information theories.
Eugen Brühwilerbirth date: 19.11.1958 nationality: Swiss (native from Dussnang, Canton of Thurgau) Education : - July 1988 : doctoral degree from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland with a thesis entitled Fracture mechanics of dam concrete subjected to quasi-static and seismic loading conditions - December 1983 : civil engineering diploma (university degree) from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich, Switzerland Professional Experience : - Since 1st April 1995 : Professor of Structural Engineering at EPFL and Head of the Laboratory of Maintenance, Construction and Safety for Civil Structures (MCS) (often considered being the first chair worldwide devoted exclusively to existing civil structures). - 1991-94 Project Manager and structural engineer with the Swiss Federal Railways (SBB), Division of Bridges and Structures, Zurich: Monitoring and maintenance of bridges and structures, Project manager and checking engineer for the construction of new bridges and rehabilitation of existing bridges. - 1989/90 Research associate at the Department of Civil Engineering, University of Colorado, Boulder, USA : Fracture mechanics of concrete and fracture of concrete dams. - 1986-88 Doctoral student at EPFL-LMC (Building Materials, Prof. Wittmann) : Fracture mechanics of concrete, fracture of concrete dams under seismic loading - 1984/85 Research engineer at EPFL-ICOM (Steel Structures, Prof. Badoux and Prof. Hirt) : Fatigue behaviour and fracture mechanics of riveted bridges
Emmanuel AbbéTeaching & PhD PhD Students Denys Pushkin, Ortal Yona Senouf, Vladyslav Shashkov Past EPFL PhD Students Elisabetta Cornacchia, Aryo Lotfi Courses Reasoning in artificial intelligence MATH-700 Large language models have raised the potential of artificial intelligence in various applications, including science and mathematics, but their reasoning capabilities remain under investigations. This class focuses on defining, measuring and improving the reasoning capabilities of such AI models.
Awa
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.
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
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.
Mohamad Baker DiaI am currently a data scientist and machine learning course developer at the EPFL Extension School, where I am involved in the production of online learning materials, designing and leading workshops and hackathons, and promoting the EPFL Extension School data science and digital skills to a wide audience.My interests include different aspects of machine learning, coding and information theory, signal processing, and inference on graphical models. I received the B.E. degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering and the B.A. degree in Economics with distinctions concurrently in 2012 from the American University of Beirut (AUB), Lebanon. I received the M.Sc. degree in Communication Systems in 2014 and the Ph.D. degree in Computer and Communication Sciences in 2018 both from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL), Switzerland.Between 2018 and 2020, I was a research scientist at the Institute for Data Science (i4DS) in the University of Applied Sciences Northwestern Switzerland (FHNW), where I worked in collaboration with the European Space Agency (ESA) on the Euclid space mission. I was a visiting researcher at Nokia Bell Labs, Germany in 2017 where I worked on the design of a novel coding scheme for the high-speed fiber optical communication systems. I was also a R&D engineer at the European Technology Center of SONY, Germany in 2014 working on the standardization of digital terrestrial TV broadcasting receivers. In 2011, I did my undergraduate internship at the University of California, Berkeley U.S.A. where I contributed to the “Mobile Millennium” traffic-monitoring project.
Aude BillardExpertise
RoboticsMachine LearningArtificial IntelligenceHuman-Robot InteractionMechatronicsDynamical Systems ControlComputational Neuroscience
Aude Billard is full professor and head of the LASA laboratory at the School of Engineering at the Swiss Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL), and the Director of the Swiss Innovation Booster on Robotics. Dr. Billard acts as the President of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society (RAS), after serving in several roles in the administrative and executive committe
Rüdiger UrbankeRüdiger L. Urbanke obtained his Dipl. Ing. degree from the Vienna University of Technology, Austria in 1990 and the M.Sc. and PhD degrees in Electrical Engineering from Washington University in St. Louis, MO, in 1992 and 1995, respectively. He held a position at the Mathematics of Communications Department at Bell Labs from 1995 till 1999 before becoming a faculty member at the School of Computer & Communication Sciences (I&C) of EPFL. He is a member of the Information Processing Group. He is principally interested in the analysis and design of iterative coding schemes, which allow reliable transmission close to theoretical limits at low complexities. Such schemes are part of most modern communications standards, including wireless transmission, optical communication and hard disk storage. More broadly, his research focuses on the analysis of graphical models and the application of methods from statistical physics to problems in communications. From 2000-2004 he was an Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory and he is currently on the board of the series "Foundations and Trends in Communications and Information Theory." In 2017 he was President of the Information Theory Society. From 2009 till 2012 he was the head of the I&C doctoral school, in 2013 he served as Dean a. i. of I&C, and since 2016 he is the Associated Dean for teaching of I&C. He is a co-author of the book "Modern Coding Theory" published by Cambridge University Press. Awards: 2021 IEEE Information Theory Society Paper Award 2016 STOC Best Paper Award 2014 La Polysphere Teaching Award 2014 IEEE Hamming Medal 2013 IEEE Information Theory Society Paper Award 2011 MASCO Best Paper Award 2011 IEEE Koji Kobayashi Award 2009 La Polysphere Teaching Award 2002 IEEE Information Theory Society Paper Award Fulbright Scholarship My students have won the following awards: M. Mondelli, 2021 IEEE Information Theory Paper Award M. Mondelli, EPFL Doctorate Award 2018 M. Mondelli, Patrick Denantes Award, 2017 M. Mondelli, IEEE IT Society Student Paper Award at ISIT, 2015 M. Mondelli, Dan David Prize Scholarship, 2015 H. Hassani, Inaugural Thomas Cover Dissertation Award, 2014 S. Kudekar, 2013 & 2021 IEEE Information Theory Paper Award A. Karbasi, Patrick Denantes Award, 2013 V. Venkatesan, Best Paper Award at MASCOTS, 2011 A. Karbasi, Best Student Paper Award at ICASSP, 2011 (with R. Parhizkar) A. Karbasi, Best Student Paper Award at ACM SIGMETRICS, 2010 (with S. Oh) S. Korada, ABB Dissertation Award, 2010 S. Korada, IEEE IT Society Student Paper Award at ISIT, 2009 (with E. Sasoglu) S. Korada, IEEE IT Society Student Paper Award at ISIT, 2008
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.
