Olexiy KochubeyTeaching & PhD PhD Students Nishant Jana Past EPFL PhD Students as codirector Aiste Baleisyte, Denys Osypenko Courses Neural circuits of motivated behaviors BIO-499 Motivated behaviors fulfil the basic physiological needs of animals and enable their safety. In this course, you will learn about the neuronal circuits that sense and regulate internal states, detect dangers in the environment, and organize appropriate behavioral responses.
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.
Tomislav MilekovicMission
Develop and advance brain-computer interfaces - devices that allow people with paralysis to control computers, robotic hands or their own paralyzed muscles directly by their brain activity - for the purpose of helping people with paralysis regain their lost abilities.
I obtained my dipl. ing. degree in Physics (equivalent to MSc in Physiscs) from the Faculty of Science of the Zagreb University in July 2006. During my undergraduate studies, I was awarded the Best Student award of the Department of Ph
Nathalie JustExpertise
OncologyMRI, fMRI, fMRS, Diffusion MRS,Animal ModelsAnimal physiologyOptogenetics, Chemogenetics
Current work
-Functional magnetic Resonance imaging in rats and mice -Manganese-enhanced MRI: High Resolution MR Imaging -Functional MR Spectroscopy in small animals - New contrasts for MRI and MRS
Mission
I am interested in all functional aspects of normal and diseased brain from neural activity to metabolism.
-2011-present: EPFL-CIBM AIT Core - Responsible for MR Imaging developments and applications
Solaiman Shokur2019 - now : Senior Scientist, Translational neuroengineering Laboratory, EPFL(Geneva)
Team leader: CHRONOS project, a multi-center European project that aims at developing the first chronically implanted prosthetic hand for transradial amputee patients with bidirectional communication capabilities. NCCR Robotics: Bi-directional control of supernumerary limbs.2014-2019: Research Coordinator, AASDAP (São Paulo, Brazil) Responsible for both the scientific production and the clinical protocol at the AASDAP neurorehabilitation laboratory.
2013-2014: Postdoctoral associate, Walk again project, Insituto Santos Dumond. (Natal, RN, Brazil)Head of the engineering team in charge of the system integration. 2010-2012: Visiting scientist, Nicolelis Lab (Duke University).
Development and validation of a virtual-reality based brain-machine interface for rhesus monkeys.
2007 – 2010: Teaching assistant, Laboratory of Robotics Systems (EPFL)
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.
Rolf GruetterAwards:
1999 Young Investigator Award Plenary Lectureship
, International Society for Neurochemistry
2011 Fellow
, ESMRMB
2011 Teaching Award
, Section Sciences de la Vie, EPFL
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.
Pierre VandergheynstPierre Vandergheynst received the M.S. degree in physics and the Ph.D. degree in mathematical physics from the Université catholique de Louvain, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium, in 1995 and 1998, respectively. From 1998 to 2001, he was a Postdoctoral Researcher with the Signal Processing Laboratory, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL), Lausanne, Switzerland. He was Assistant Professor at EPFL (2002-2007), where he is now a Full Professor of Electrical Engineering and, by courtesy, of Computer and Communication Sciences. As of 2015, Prof. Vandergheynst serves as EPFL’s Vice-Provost for Education. His research focuses on harmonic analysis, sparse approximations and mathematical data processing in general with applications covering signal, image and high dimensional data processing, computer vision, machine learning, data science and graph-based data processing. He was co-Editor-in-Chief of Signal Processing (2002-2006), Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing (2007-2011), the flagship journal of the signal processing community and currently serves as Associate Editor of Computer Vision and Image Understanding and SIAM Imaging Sciences. He has been on the Technical Committee of various conferences, serves on the steering committee of the SPARS workshop and was co-General Chairman of the EUSIPCO 2008 conference. Pierre Vandergheynst is the author or co-author of more than 70 journal papers, one monograph and several book chapters. He has received two IEEE best paper awards. Professor Vandergheynst is a laureate of the Apple 2007 ARTS award and of the 2009-2010 De Boelpaepe prize of the Royal Academy of Sciences of Belgium.
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.
Wulfram GerstnerWulfram Gerstner is Director of the Laboratory of Computational Neuroscience LCN at the EPFL. His research in computational neuroscience concentrates on models of spiking neurons and spike-timing dependent plasticity, on the problem of neuronal coding in single neurons and populations, as well as on the link between biologically plausible learning rules and behavioral manifestations of learning. He teaches courses for Physicists, Computer Scientists, Mathematicians, and Life Scientists at the EPFL. After studies of Physics in Tübingen and at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich (Master 1989), Wulfram Gerstner spent a year as a visiting researcher in Berkeley. He received his PhD in theoretical physics from the Technical University Munich in 1993 with a thesis on associative memory and dynamics in networks of spiking neurons. After short postdoctoral stays at Brandeis University and the Technical University of Munich, he joined the EPFL in 1996 as assistant professor. Promoted to Associate Professor with tenure in February 2001, he is since August 2006 a full professor with double appointment in the School of Computer and Communication Sciences and the School of Life Sciences. Wulfram Gerstner has been invited speaker at numerous international conferences and workshops. He has served on the editorial board of the Journal of Neuroscience, Network: Computation in Neural Systems', Journal of Computational Neuroscience', and `Science'.
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
Raphaël DoenlenEducation Master | Neurosciences 2004 – 2004 University of Louis Pasteur, Strasbourg (France) Master | Psycho-pharmacology 2005 – 2005 University of Bordeaux 1 (France) PhD | Life Sciences - Neuro-immunology 2005 – 2008 Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, ETH Zürich (Switzerland) Directed by Principal supervisor: Prof. Joram Feldon, Institute of Behavioural Neurobiology, ETH Zürich (Switzerland)Co-supervisor: Prof. Manfred S
Auke IjspeertAuke Ijspeert is a full professor at the EPFL, and head of the Biorobotics Laboratory (BioRob). He has a B.Sc./M.Sc. in physics from the EPFL (1995), and a PhD in artificial intelligence from the University of Edinburgh (1999). He carried out postdocs at IDSIA and EPFL, and at the University of Southern California (USC). He then became a research assistant professor at USC, and an external collaborator at ATR (Advanced Telecommunications Research institute) in Japan. In 2002, he came back to the EPFL as an SNF assistant professor. He was promoted to associate professor in October 2009 and to full professor in April 2016. His primary affiliation is with the Institute of Bioengineering, and secondary affiliation with the Institute of Mechanical Engineering. His research interests are at the intersection between robotics, computational neuroscience, nonlinear dynamical systems, and machine learning. He is interested in using numerical simulations and robots to get a better understanding of sensorimotor coordination in animals, and in using inspiration from biology to design novel types of robots and adaptive controllers. (see for instance Ijspeert et al Science 2007, Ijspeert Science 2014, and Nyakatura et al Nature 2019). He is also investigating how to assist people with limited mobility using exoskeletons and assistive furniture. He is regularly invited to give talks on these topics (e.g. TED talk given at TED Global Geneva, Dec 8 2015). With his colleagues, he has received paper awards at ICRA2002, CLAWAR2005, IEEE Humanoids 2007, IEEE ROMAN 2014, CLAWAR 2015, SAB2018, and CLAWAR 2019. He is an IEEE Fellow, member of the Board of Reviewing Editors of Science magazine, and associate editor for the IEEE Transactions on Medical Robotics and Bionics and for the International Journal of Humanoid Robotics. He has acted as an associate editor for the IEEE Transactions on Robotics (2009-2013) and for Soft Robotics (2018-2021). He was a guest editor for the Proceedings of IEEE, IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering, Autonomous Robots, IEEE Robotics and Automation Magazine, and Biological Cybernetics. He has been the organizer of 7 international conferences (BioADIT2004, SAB2004, AMAM2005, BioADIT2006, LATSIS2006, SSRR2016, AMAM2019), and a program committee member of over 50 conferences.
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.
