Dominique PiolettiDominique Pioletti received his Master in Physics from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL) in 1992. He pursued his education in the same Institution and obtained his PhD in biomechanics in 1997. He developed original constitutive laws taking into account viscoelasticity in large deformations. Then he spent two years at UCSD as post-doc fellow acquiring know-how in cell and molecular biology. He was interested in particular to gene expression of bone cells in contact to orthopedic implant. In April 2006, Dominique Pioletti was appointed Assistant Professor tenure-track at the EPFL and is director of the Laboratory of Biomechanical Orthopedics. His research topics include biomechanics and tissue engineering of musculo-skeletal tissues; mechano-transduction in bone; development of orthopedic implant as drug delivery system. Since 2013, he has been promoted to the rank of Associate Professor.
Robert WestRobert West is a tenure-track assistant professor of computer science at EPFL, where he heads the Data Science Lab. In his research, he develops and applies techniques in machine learning, computational social science, natural language processing, social network analysis, and data mining. Bob also collaborates closely with the Wikimedia Foundation, in his role as a Wikimedia Research Fellow. Bob’s work has won several awards, including best/outstanding paper awards at ICWSM’21, ICWSM’19, and WWW’13, a best-paper runner-up award at WWW’16, a Google Faculty Research Award, a Facebook Research Award, a Hewlett-Packard Graduate Fellowship, and a Facebook Graduate Fellowship. He is actively involved in the research community, e.g., as an Associate Editor of ICWSM and EPJ Data Science and as a co-founder of the Wiki Workshop (held at WWW and ICWSM) and the Applied Machine Learning Days. Bob received his PhD in Computer Science from Stanford University, his MSc from McGill University, Canada, and his undergraduate degree from Technische Universität München, Germany.[Last updated: 25 Aug 2021]
Alexander MathisAlexander studied pure mathematics with a minor in logic and theory of science at the Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich. For his PhD also at LMU, he worked on optimal coding approaches to elucidate the properties of grid cells. As a postdoctoral fellow with Prof. Venkatesh N. Murthy at Harvard University and Prof. Matthias Bethge at Tuebingen AI, he decided to study olfactory behaviors such as odor-guided navigation, social behaviors and the cocktail party problem in mice. During this time, he increasingly got interested sensorimotor behaviors beyond olfaction and started working on proprioception, motor adaption, as well as computer vision tools for measuring animal behavior.
In his group, he is interested in elucidating how the brain gives rise to adaptive behavior. One of the major goals is to synthesize large datasets into computationally useful information. For those purposes, he develops algorithms and systems to analyze animal behavior (e.g. DeepLabCut), neural data, as well as creates experimentally testable computational models.
Mathieu SalzmannI am a Senior Researcher at EPFL-CVLab, and, since May 2020, an Artificial Intelligence Engineer at ClearSpace (50%). Previously, I was a Senior Researcher and Research Leader in NICTA's computer vision research group. Prior to this, from Sept. 2010 to Jan 2012, I was a Research Assistant Professor at TTI-Chicago, and, from Feb. 2009 to Aug. 2010, a postdoctoral fellow at ICSI and EECS at UC Berkeley under the supervision of Prof. Trevor Darrell. I obtained my PhD in Jan. 2009 from EPFL under the supervision of Prof. Pascal Fua.
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.
Andreas FusterAndreas Fuster is an Associate Professor of Finance at Swiss Finance Institute @ EPFL and a Research Fellow at the CEPR. Previously, he worked at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and the Swiss National Bank. Andreas's main research interests are in empirical finance, macroeconomics, and behavioral economics. His recent work has focused in particular on the effects of technological advances on household credit markets. Andreas’s research has been published in academic journals such as the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the Review of Economic Studies, the Journal of Finance, and the Review of Financial Studies. Andreas obtained his Ph.D. from Harvard University and also holds an M.Phil. from Oxford University and a B.A. from the University of Lausanne (Switzerland), all in economics.
Solomzi MakohlisoTeaching & PhD Courses Development engineering ENV-470 This course teaches the fundamentals of technologies for development (Development Engineering) to design, pilot, and deploy appropriate, affordable and robust technologies to address sustainable development challenges and especially those related to extreme poverty in Low-income settings. Science, Technology & Vulnerability HUM-287 This course explores how science and technology can address extreme vulnerability caused by
Klaus Benedikt SchönenbergerVision: Scientific research and technology development can be mobilized to help the poorest and most vulnerable in this world. Klaus Schönenberger obtained an MSc in Microengineering (1993), followed by a PhD (1996) from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL). After a post-doc at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, he spent over 10 years in the medical devices industry in leading positions such as Vice-President of Worldwide R&D in a 100mcompanyandGlobalVice−ResidentofResearchandTechnologyina1bn company. In 2009, as he was working for a medical devices company, he received a shock: he realized that there is a huge imbalance in access to medical technology in industrialized versus low and middle-income countries. After a closer look, he discovered that he imbalance’s main cause is a mismatch between existing technologies and business models, with those needed in low and middle-income countries. He decided to leave industry and, in 2009, he co-founded the EssentialMed Foundation, an innovative non-profit venture. In 2011, realizing that both technology and business models needed a profound rethinking, he joined EPFL where he launched EssentialTech, an initiative inspired by the philosophy of EssentialMed but expanded to a much wider portfolio of "essential" technologies. The university-wide program aims to develop innovative technologies and business models, for the benefit of sustainable development in low and middle-income countries. In this role, he has already launched and overseen a dozen large projects. Major Humanitarian actors such as the ICRC, MSF and Terre des Hommes took notice of the innovative approach proposed, and decided to collaborate in 2015-2016. This has resulted notably in the joint creation between EPFL and ICRC, of the Humanitarian Tech Hub at EPFL. In May 2017, Klaus directed and launched a MOOC(Massive Open Online Course) entitled “Technology Innovation for Sustainable Development” which aims to spread the unique methodology and approach worldwide. As of today, more than 6000 people have enrolled. In 2018 a first spin-off company was created. Award winning Pristem SA will deploy an innovative new digital xray imaging system, specifically designed for low-income contexts. In December 2018, the creation of the EssentialTech centre was announced by EPFL's presidency, and Klaus is now the Centre's director. Another spin-off of the EssentialTech Centre is the company HMCare, launched in 2020, which is deploying a transparent surgical mask. 