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.
Martin OderskyMartin Odersky heads the programming research group at EPFL. His research interests cover fundamental as well as applied aspects of programming languages. They include semantics, type systems, programming language design, and compiler construction. The main focus if his work lies in the integration of object-oriented and functional programming. His research thesis is that the two paradigms are just two sides of the same coin and should be unified as much as possible. To prove this he has experimented a number of language designs, from Pizza to GJ to Functional Nets. He has also influenced the development of Java as a co-designer of Java generics and as the original author of the current javac reference compiler. His current work concentrates on the Scala programming language, which unifies FP and OOP, while staying completely interoperable with Java and .NET.
Martin Odersky got his doctorate from ETHZ, in 1989. He held research positions at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center from 1989 and at Yale University from 1991. He was then a professor at the University of Karlsruhe from 1993 and at the University of South Australia from 1997. He joined EPFL as full professor in 1999. He is associate editor of the Journal of Functional Programming and member of IFIP WG 2.8. He was conference chair for ICFP 2000, and program chair for ECOOP 2004 as well as ETAPS/CC 2007.
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.
Mihai Adrian IonescuAdrian M. Ionescu is Full Professor at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Lausanne, Switzerland. He received the B.S./M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the Polytechnic Institute of Bucharest, Romania and the National Polytechnic Institute of Grenoble, France, in 1989 and 1997, respectively. He has held staff and/or visiting positions at LETI-CEA, Grenoble, France and INP Grenoble, France and Stanford University, USA, in 1998 and 1999. Dr. Ionescu has published more than 600 articles in international journals and conferences. He received many Best Paper Awards in international conferences, the Annual Award of the Technical Section of the Romanian Academy of Sciences in 1994 and the Blondel Medal in 2009 for contributions to the progress in engineering sciences in the domain of electronics. He is the 2013 recipient of the IBM Faculty Award in Engineering. He served the IEDM and VLSI conference technical committees and was the Technical Program Committee (Co)Chair of ESSDERC in 2006 and 2013. He is a member of the SATW. He is director of the Laboratory of Micro/Nanoelectronic Devices (NANOLAB).
David Atienza AlonsoDavid Atienza Alonso is an associate professor of EE and director of the Embedded Systems Laboratory (ESL) at EPFL, Switzerland. He received his MSc and PhD degrees in computer science and engineering from UCM, Spain, and IMEC, Belgium, in 2001 and 2005, respectively. His research interests include system-level design methodologies for multi-processor system-on-chip (MPSoC) servers and edge AI architectures. Dr. Atienza has co-authored more than 350 papers, one book, and 12 patents in these previous areas. He has also received several recognitions and award, among them, the ICCAD 10-Year Retrospective Most Influential Paper Award in 2020, Design Automation Conference (DAC) Under-40 Innovators Award in 2018, the IEEE TCCPS Mid-Career Award in 2018, an ERC Consolidator Grant in 2016, the IEEE CEDA Early Career Award in 2013, the ACM SIGDA Outstanding New Faculty Award in 2012, and a Faculty Award from Sun Labs at Oracle in 2011. He has also earned two best paper awards at the VLSI-SoC 2009 and CST-HPCS 2012 conference, and five best paper award nominations at the DAC 2013, DATE 2013, WEHA-HPCS 2010, ICCAD 2006, and DAC 2004 conferences. He serves or has served as associate editor of IEEE Trans. on Computers (TC), IEEE Design & Test of Computers (D&T), IEEE Trans. on CAD (T-CAD), IEEE Transactions on Sustainable Computing (T-SUSC), and Elsevier Integration. He was the Technical Program Chair of DATE 2015 and General Chair of DATE 2017. He served as President of IEEE CEDA in the period 2018-2019 and was GOLD member of the Board of Governors of IEEE CASS from 2010 to 2012. He is a Distinguished Member of ACM and an IEEE Fellow.
Dimitrios LignosProf. Lignos joined the École Polytechnique Féderale de Lausanne (EPFL) in 2016 from McGill University in Canada where he was a tenured Associate Professor and a William Dawson Scholar for Infrastructure Resilience. He holds a diploma (National Technical University of Athens, NTUA, 2003), M.S. (Stanford University, 2004) and Ph.D. (Stanford University, 2008). In addition, he was a post-doctoral scientist at Stanford University (2009) and in Kyoto University (2010). Prof. Lignos teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in seismic design, nonlinear behaviour of steel and composite structures as well as supplemental damping systems, Structural Stability, Nonlinear Analysis and Performance-based Earthquake Engineering. His awards for teaching, research and service in Civil Engineering include the 2011 Outstanding Teaching Award (Faculty of Engineering, McGill University), as well as the Outstanding reviewer (2012, 2013) award from ASCE, the 2013 State-of-the-Art in Civil Engineering Award by ASCE and the 2014 Christophe Pierre Award for Research Excellence - Early Career. Just recently, he received the 2019 Walter L. Huber Civil Engineering Research Prize from ASCE for significant contributions in developing state of the art methods to simulate extreme limit states in steel structures.Prof. Lignos is a member of ASCE and the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute. He acts as an Associate Editor for Metal Structures and Seismic Effects of the ASCE Journal of Structural Engineering. He joined the Editorial Board of Earthquake Spectra and Earthquake Engineering and Structural Dynamics International journals. He serves as an acting member of the CEN/TC 250/SC 8/WG 2 and has been selected as a member of the Project Team (PT2) for the Eurocode 8-Part 1 Current Revisions for Steel and Composite Structures. He is also a member of the Canadian Standards Association (CSA) S16 technical committee for Steel Structures. Prof. Lignos is involved as a NEHRP consultant in numerous research-to-practice projects related to the behaviour and nonlinear modelling and analysis of structures applicable to the engineering practice through the Applied Technology Council (ATC). Detailed Curriculum Vitae (last update September 2018)
Mario PaoloneMario Paolone received the M.Sc. (with honors) and the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from the University of Bologna, Italy, in 1998 and 2002, respectively. In 2005, he was appointed assistant professor in power systems at the University of Bologna where he was with the Power Systems laboratory until 2011. In 2010, he received the Associate Professor eligibility from the Politecnico di Milano, Italy. Since 2011 he joined the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Lausanne, Switzerland, where he is now Full Professor, Chair of the Distributed Electrical Systems laboratory and Head of the Swiss Competence Center for Energy Research (SCCER) FURIES (Future Swiss Electrical infrastructure). He was co-chairperson of the technical programme committees of the 9th edition of the International Conference of Power Systems Transients (IPST 2009) and of the 2016 Power Systems Computation Conference (PSCC 2016). He was chair of the technical programme committee of the 2018 Power Systems Computation Conference (PSCC 2018). In 2013, he was the recipient of the IEEE EMC Society Technical Achievement Award. He was co-author of several papers that received the following awards: best IEEE Transactions on EMC paper award for the year 2017, in 2014 best paper award at the 13th International Conference on Probabilistic Methods Applied to Power Systems, Durham, UK, in 2013 Basil Papadias best paper award at the 2013 IEEE PowerTech, Grenoble, France, in 2008 best paper award at the International Universities Power Engineering Conference (UPEC). He was the founder Editor-in-Chief of the Elsevier journal Sustainable Energy, Grids and Networks and was Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics. His research interests are in power systems with particular reference to real-time monitoring and operation, power system protections, power systems dynamics and power system transients. Mario Paolone is author or coauthor of over 300 scientific papers published in reviewed journals and international conferences.
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.
Christophe SalzmannExpertise
Real-time Internet ServicesReal-time controlQuality of Service and Bandwidth adaptationLabVIEW
Education PhD | Remote experimentation, Network 2005 – 2005 EPFL Directed by Denis Gillet MS. Degree | Computer Science 1999 – 1999 University of Florida Directed by Prof. H. Latchman
Teaching & PhD Past EPFL PhD Students as codirector Damien Perritaz, Evgeny Bogdanov, Wissam Halimi Courses Control systems + TP ME
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.
Jan Sickmann HesthavenProf. Hesthaven received an M.Sc. in computational physics from the Technical University of Denmark (DTU) in August 1991. During the studies, the last 6 months of 1989 was spend at JET, the european fusion laboratory in Culham, UK. Following graduation, he was awarded a 3 year fellowship to begin work towards a Ph.D. at Riso National Laboratory in the Department of Optics and Fluid Dynamics. During the 3 years of study, the academic year of 1993-1994 was spend in the Division of Applied Mathematics at Brown University and three 3 months during the summer of 1994 in Department of Mathematics and Statistics at University of New Mexico. In August 1995, he recieved a Ph.D. in Numerical Analysis from the Institute of Mathematical Modelling (DTU). Following graduation in August 1995, he was awarded an NSF Postdoctoral Fellowship in Advanced Scientific Computing and was approinted Visiting Assistant Professor in the Division of Applied Mathematics at Brown University. In December of 1996, he was appointed consultant to the Institute of Computer Applications in Science and Engineering(ICASE) at NASA Langley Research Center (NASA LaRC). As of July 1999, he was appointed Assistant Professor of Applied Mathematics, in September 2000 he was awarded an Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship, as of July 2001 he was awarded a Manning Assistant Professorship, and in March 2002, he was awarded an NSF Career Award. In January 2003, he was promoted to Associate Professor of Applied Mathematics with tenure and in May 2004 he was awarded Philip J. Bray Award for Excellence in Teaching in the Sciences (the highest award given for teaching excellence in all sciences at Brown University). He was promoted to Professor of Applied Mathematics as of July 2005. From October 2006 to June 2013, he was the Founding Director of the Center for Computation and Visualization (CCV) at Brown University. As of October 2007, he holds the (honorary) title of Professor (Adjunct) at the Technical University of Denmark. In November 2009, he successfully defended his dr.techn thesis at the Technical University of Denmark and was rewarded the degree of Doctor Technices -- the highest academic distinction awarded based on ... substantial and lasting contributions that has helped to move the research area forward and penetrated into applications. As grant Co-PI he served from Aug 2010 to June 2013 as Deputy Director of the Institute of Computational and Experimental Research in Mathematics (ICERM), the newest NSF Mathematical Sciences Research Institute. After having spend his entire academic career at Brown University, Prof Hesthaven decided to pursue new challenges and joined the Mathematics Institute of Computational Science and Engineering (MATHICSE) at Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland in July 2013. In March 2014 he was elected SIAM Fellow for contributions to high-order methods for partial differential equations.
Arne Seitz04/1996-06/2000 Scientific co-worker at Philipps-University of Marburg, Dep. of Physical Chemistry
07/2000-10/2002 Post Doc at Max-Planck Unit for Structural Molecular Biology in Hamburg
11/2002-11/2005 Post Doc at European Molecular Biolohy Laboratory (EMBL), Cell Biology and Cell Biophysics Programme
11/2005-03/2009 Staff Scientist at Advanced Light Microscopy Facility, EMBL
04/2009- Head of Bioimaging and Optics platforme (BIOP), Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL)
Romain GuietExpertise
Development of BioImage Analysis workflows and algorithms to extract quantitative data from microscopy images.BioSample Preparation : in vitro cell, organoid, time-lapse, fixation, staining strategies, actin, mitochondria, fluorescent protein expressionBioImage Acquisition : Widefield, Confocal, Whole Slide Imaging, Super-resolution (SIM, STORM, STED), FRET, FRAP, FLIMBioImage Analysis: Colocalisation analysis, Deconvolution, Time-lapse , Whole Slide ImagingTools & Software: ImageJ/Fiji, QuPath, i
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.
