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.
Georges WagnièresGeorges Wagnières received his diploma degree (MSc) in physics from the University of Lausanne, Switzerland, in 1986. He obtained his doctorate in science (PhD) in physics (Biomedical optics) from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology at Lausanne (EPFL) in 1992 and did a postdoctoral work in the Wellman Laboratories of Photomedicine (Harvard Medical School), Boston, USA, from 1993 to 1994. He also obtained a Master degree in Management of Technology delivered by the Ecole des Hautes Etudes Commerciales (HEC) of Lausanne University and the EPFL in 2001. Georges Wagnières manages a research group active in the fields of: - Detection of early superficial cancers by fluorescence imaging. - Characterization of early superficial cancers by high magnification narrow band imaging. - In vivo and in vitro measurement of the vascular and tissular oxygen concentration by time-resolved luminescence spectroscopy and imaging. - Preclinical and clinical study of new photosensitizers for photodynamic therapy (PDT). - Treatment of neurodegenerative conditions (Alzheimer, Parkinson's diseases) by photobiomodulation. - Preclinical and clinical photodynamic therapy of inflammatory bowel diseases and atheroscerotic plaque. - Improvement of the selective vascular extravasation of chemotherapeutic agents by PDT. - Monitoring the light dosimetry during PDT by fluorescence spectroscopy and imaging. - Monitoring laser treatments of the retina by reflectance imaging. - Light dosimetry and tissue optical spectroscopy. - Radiometry. - Development of light delivery systems for biomedical applications. Georges Wagnières is also co-founder and was chairman of one spin-off companies: - Medlight SA, founded in July 1997, which develops, produces and commercializes light distributors for photodynamic therapy. Georges Wagnières has currently authored more than 235 papers (more than 150 in international journals with review board) and is inventor of 18 patents. He supervised 12 PhD students up to now, and currently teaches biomedical optics and photomedicine in master programs and doctoral schools. In addition, he gives the course entitled "Physique Générale I" to biology first year students registered to the Biology School of the Lausanne's University. MAIN PUBLICATIONS Please visit: https://www.epfl.ch/labs/lifmet/wagnieres/publications/ 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.
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'.
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.
Paul Joseph DysonPaul Dyson joined the Institute of Chemical Sciences and Engineering at the EPFL in 2002 where he heads the Laboratory of Organometallic and Medicinal Chemistry and between 2008 and 2016 chaired the Institute. He has won several prizes including the Werner Prize of the Swiss Chemical Society in 2004, the Award for Outstanding Achievements in Bioorganometallic Chemistry in 2010, the Centennial Luigi Sacconi Medal of the Italian Chemical Society in 2011, the Bioinorganic Chemistry Award of the Royal Society of Chemistry in 2015, the European Sustainable Chemistry Award of the European Chemical Society in 2018 and the Green Chemistry Award from the Royal Society of Chemistry in 2020. He is also a Clarivate Highly Cited Researcher and has an H-index >110 (web of science and google scholar). He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry in 2010, a Fellow of the European Academy of Science in 2019 and a life-long fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2020. Over the years he has held visiting professorships at the University of Bourgogne, University of Pierre et Marie Curie, University of Vienna, University of Rome Tor Vergara, Chimie Paristech and Shangai Jiao Tong University.Since 2016 he has been Member of the Council of the Division of Mathematics, Natural and Engineering Sciences at the Swiss National Science Foundation.Between 2016-2021 he has been Member of the Council of the Division of Mathematics, Natural and Engineering Sciences at the Swiss National Science Foundation. In 2021 he was appointed Dean of the Faculty of Basic Sciences.
Mathieu LemayTeaching & PhD Past EPFL PhD Students as codirector Martin Proença Courses Applied biomedical signal processing EE-512 The goal of this course is twofold: (1) to introduce physiological basis, signal acquisition solutions (sensors) and state-of-the-art signal processing techniques, and (2) to propose concrete examples of applications for vital sign monitoring and diagnosis purposes.
Marco MattavelliTeaching & PhD Past EPFL PhD Students Christophe Clerc, Ruohua Zhou, Beilu Shao, Christophe Lucarz, Richard Thavot, Ab Al Hadi Bin Ab Rahman, Endri Bezati, Simone Casale Brunet, Malgorzata Michalska, Ana Angelica Hernandez Lopez, Aurélien Bloch, Mustafa Besirli, Ünsal Öztürk Past EPFL PhD Students as codirector Sylvain Aguirre Courses Systems and architectures for signal processing EE-555 Study of the essential components and implementation technologies of digital signal processing and commu
Diego Ruben BarrettinoDiego Barrettino (S’93–M’98–SM’06) received the Dipl.-Ing. degree in Electronic Engineering from the University of Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1997, and the Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ETHZ) in 2004.
He worked at Allegro MicroSystems Inc., from 1997 to 2000, where he was an Analog IC Designer of Hall-effect magnetic sensors. From 2000 to 2004, he was a Ph.D. student and Research Assistant at ETHZ, where he designed chemical and mechanical sensors. In 2004, he moved to the USA where he designed biomedical devices first as a Post-Doctoral Research Associate in the University of Washington, and then as an Assistant Professor in the University of Hawaii. In 2006, he returned to Europe where he joined the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL) as a Senior Research Scientist for the design and development of biosensors using organic nanotransistors. From 2007 to 2009, he was a Senior Lecturer in the University of Glasgow, U.K., and in the University College Cork, Republic of Ireland, where he designed ultra-low power biomedical devices. From 2009 to 2017, he was Full Professor and Head of the Laboratory of Microelectronics, Bioelectronics and Sensor Systems (LMBS) at the University of Applied Sciences of Southern Switzerland (SUPSI), where he designed smart contact lenses and eye implants. In 2017, he joined both the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences (HSLU) and EPFL as a part-time Senior Research Scientist to continue his work on smart sensor systems.
His research interests are in the fields of physical, chemical, and biomedical microsensors; sensor fusion algorithms; analog and mixed-signal IC design; MEMS; embedded systems; avionics and bioelectronics.
Diego Barrettino is a senior member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), a member of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) and a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).
