Guido HaefeliTeaching & PhD PhD Students Federico Ronchetti, Gauri Napoletano Past EPFL PhD Students as codirector Axel Kuonen, Olivier Göran Girard, Carina Trippl Courses Particle detection PHYS-440 The course will cover the physics of particle detectors. It will introduce the experimental techniques used in nuclear and particle physics. The lecture includes the interaction of particles with matter, scintillators, gas detectors, silicon detectors, detectors for particle ID and photo-detectors.
Olivier SchneiderAfter his thesis defense in particle physics in 1989 at University of Lausanne, Olivier Schneider joins LBL, the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory (California), to work on the CDF experiment at the Tevatron in Fermilab (Illinois), first as a research fellow supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation, and later as a post-doc at LBL. He participates in the construction and commissioning of the first silicon vertex detector to operate successfully at a hadron collider; this detector enabled the discovery of the sixth quark, named "top". Since 1994, he comes back to Europe and participates in the ALEPH experiment at CERN's Large Electron-Positron Collider, as CERN fellow and then as CERN scientific staff. He specializes in heavy flavour physics. In 1998, he becomes associate professor at University of Lausanne, then extraordinary professor at the Swiss Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL) in 2003, and finally full professor at EPFL in 2010. Having worked since 1997 on the preparation of the LHCb experiment at CERN's Large Hadron Collider, which started operation in 2009, he is now analyzing the first data. He also contributes since 2001 to the exploitation of the data recorded at the Belle experiment (KEK laboratory, Tsukuba, Japan). These two experiments study mainly the decays of hadrons containing a b quark, as well CP violation, i.e. the non-invariance under the symmetry between matter and antimatter.
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.
Olivier SauterTeaching & PhD PhD Students Cassandre Ekta Contré, Antonia Frank, Peizheng Zhang, Jean-Pierre Thomas Svantner, Cristina Venturini, Cosmas Quirin Lorenz Heiss, Daniel Perales Rios, Viacheslav Bochkarev, Jan Jakub Frybes, Paul Véronique Guillaume Devianne Past EPFL PhD Students Clemente Angioni, Petri Nikkola, Alberto Bottino, Andrei Martynov, Emiliano Fable, Costanza Zucca, Federico Felici, Dávid Wágner, Doohyun Kim, Anna Teplukhina, Mengdi Kong, Francesco Carpanese, Simon Van Mulders, Stefano Marchioni, F
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.
Athanasios NenesTeaching & PhD PhD Students Berkay Dönmez, Ernest Abboud Past EPFL PhD Students Paraskevi Georgakaki, Lucile Ricard Courses Atmospheric processes: from cloud to global scales ENV-407 The main objective is to present important atmospheric processes from the local to global scales. The course will start with cloud processes, continue to synoptic phenomena like extratropical cyclones and fronts, to finally cover numerical modeling at the regional and global scales. Introduction to environme
Laurie PorteTeaching & PhD PhD Students James Winston Irawati Tumbokon, Oliver Morais Moura Past EPFL PhD Students as codirector Matteo Fontana, Pedro Andres Molina Cabrera, Arsène Tema Biwole Courses Atomic and radiative processes in plasmas PHYS-762 The course covers atomic structure, collisional-radiative (CR) processes, and spectroscopic techniques. Students learn to critically apply CR models, evaluate spectroscopic tools, and interpret experimental data obtained in different plasmas.
Stefano CodaTeaching & PhD PhD Students Vincent Masson, Luigi Persico, Ewout Koen L. Devlaminck, Martino Bonisolli, Alessandro Balestri, Mackenzie Peter-Fulford Van Rossem, James Winston Irawati Tumbokon, Salomon Guinchard, Inès Vergara, Michele Bottino Past EPFL PhD Students Alessandro Marinoni, Silvano Gnesin, Cornelis Adrianus de Meijere, Josef Kamleitner, Zhouji Huang, Himank Anand, Pedro Andres Molina Cabrera, Dahye Choi, Federico Pesamosca, Aylwin Iantchenko, Jean Arthur Cazabonne
Paolo IennePaolo Ienne has been a Professor at the EPFL since 2000 and heads the Processor Architecture Laboratory (LAP). Prior to that, he worked for the Semiconductors Group of Siemens AG, Munich, Germany (which later became Infineon Technologies AG) where he was at the head of the Embedded Memories unit in the Design Libraries division. His research interests include various aspects of computer and processor architecture, FPGAs and reconfigurable computing, electronic design automation, and computer arithmetic. Ienne was a recipient of Best Paper Awards at the 20th, 24th, and 28th ACM/SIGDA International Symposia on Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA), in 2012, 2016 and 2020, at the 19th and 30th International Conference on Field-Programmable Logic and Applications (FPL), in 2009 and 2020, at the International Conference on Compilers, Architectures, and Synthesis for Embedded Systems (CASES), in 2007, and at the 40th Design Automation Conference (DAC), in 2003; many other papers have been candidates to Best Paper Awards in prestigious venues. He has served as general, programme, and topic chair of renown international conferences, including organizing in Lausanne the 26th International Conference on Field-Programmable Logic and Applications (FPL) in 2016. He serves on the steering committee of the IEEE Symposium on Computer Arithmetic (ARITH) and of the International Conference on Field-Programmable Logic and Applications (FPL). Ienne has guest edited a number of special issues and special sections on various topics for IEEE and ACM journals. He is regularly member of program committees of international workshops and conferences in the areas of design automation, computer architecture, embedded systems, compilers, FPGAs, and asynchronous design. He has been an associate editor of ACM Transactions on Architecture and Code Optimization (TACO), since 2015, of ACM Computing Surveys (CSUR), since 2014, and of ACM Transactions on Design Automation of Electronic Systems (TODAES) from 2011 to 2016.
Francesco StellacciFrancesco Stellacci graduated in Materials Engineering at the Politecnico di Milano in 1998 with a thesis on photochromic polymers with Prof. Giuseppe Zerbi and Mariacarla Gallazzi. In 1999 he moved to the Chemistry Department of the University of Arizona for as a post-doc in the group of Joe Perry in close collaboration with the group of Seth Marder. In 2002 he moved to the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as an assistant professor. He was then promoted to associate without (2006) and with tenure (2009). In 2010 he moved to the Institute of Materials at EPFL as a full Professor. He holds the Alcan EP Chair. Francesco was one of the recipients of the Technology Review TR35 "35 Innovator under 35" award in 2005, and the Popular Science Magazine "Brilliant 10" award in 2007. He has been a Packard Fellow starting 2005.
Friedrich EisenbrandFriedrich Eisenbrand's main research interests lie in the field of discrete optimization, in particular in algorithms and complexity, integer programming, geometry of numbers, and applied optimization. He is best known for his work on efficient algorithms for integer programming in fixed dimension and the theory of cutting planes, which are an important tool to solve large scale industrial optimization problems in practice.
Before joining EPFL in March 2008, Friedrich Eisenbrand was a full professor of mathematics at the University of Paderborn. Friedrich received the Heinz Maier-Leibnitz award of the German Research Foundation (DFG) in 2004 and the Otto Hahn medal of the Max Planck Society in 2001.
Paolo BenettinI was born in Padova, Italy, in 1986. After high school, I started the Environmental Engineering program at the University of Padova (Bachelor and Master), where I followed the 'soil protection' curriculum. During my Master studies I spent a semester as Erasmus student at Wageningen University (Wageningen, the Netherlands) to follow courses in Hydrology. After graduation, I decided to bring my education further and I started a Ph.D. at the civil and environmental engineering department at the University of Padova. My Ph.D. thesis focused on hydrologic transport and travel time distributions at the catchment scale. My contribution to the subject included both new theoretical formulations and extensive numerical applications to real catchments. During my Ph.D., I also spent 7 months as visiting research fellow at Virginia Tech University (Blacksburg, USA). Since I arrived at EPFL as post-doc in 2015, I started being involved in field and experimental activities, which allowed me to learn about practical experimental problems. In 2017 I had the opportunity to by hired by the ECHO laboratory as a permanent scientist, conducting research in the field of catchment hydrology.
Shaik Mohammed ZakeeruddinTeaching & PhD Past EPFL PhD Students as codirector Magdalena Anna Marszalek, Jiyoun Seo, Marko Stojanovic, Natalie Flores Diaz, Anwar Qasem M Alanazi, Thomas Paul Baumeler, Essa Awadh R Alharbi, Masaud Hassan S Almalki
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.
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.
