Martin SchrimpfExpertise
NeuroAI, computational neuroscience, computer vision, natural language processing, human alignment, startups [CV]
Mission
Modeling the brain: Martin's research focuses on a computational understanding of the neural mechanisms underlying natural intelligence in vision and language. To achieve this goal, he bridges Deep Learning, Neuroscience, and Cognitive Science, building artificial neural network models that match the brain’s neural representations in their internal processing and are aligned to
Valerio ZerbiDr. Valerio Zerbi is a pioneer of preclinical magnetic resonance functional neuroimaging. At his lab at EPFL, Valerio and his team use functional MRI recordings in rodents in combination with neural modulation and computational approaches to study the mechanisms that link cellular activity to large-scale network (dys)function. His long-term ambition is to advance the development of personalised strategies based on imaging and artificial intelligence, for the diagnosis and prognosis of developmental brain disorders. Valerio is the recipient of the ETH Postdoctoral (2014), the Swiss National Science Foundation AMBIZIONE
(2017) and ECCELLENZA (2021) fellowships.
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.
Anastasios VassilopoulosPERSONAL INFORMATION Name : Anastasios P. Vassilopoulos email : anastasios.vassilopoulos@epfl.ch Tel: 41 21 6936393 Fax: 41 21 6936240 SUMMARY OF QUALIFICATIONS 1995: Dipl. Mechanical Engineer, University of Patras, Greece 2001: Dr Mechanical Engineer, Doctoral thesis in fatigue of composite materials from the Dept. Mechanical Engineering and Aeronautics, University of Patras, Greece CURRENT POSITION Senior Scientist (MER), Composite Construction Laboaratory (CCLab), EPFL PREVIOUS POSITIONS 2006-2012 Research and Teaching Associate, Composite Construction Laboaratory (CCLab), EPFL 2002-2006 Assisstant Professor, Technological Educational Institute (TEI) of Patras, Greece 2001-2003 Post-doctoral Research associate, (Part-time) Dept. Mechanical Engineering and Aeronautics of the University of Patras, Greece. EDUCATION 1990 - 1995 Graduate student, Dept. Mechanical Engineering and Aeronautics, University of Patras, Greece October 1994-January 1995 Dept. Mechanical Engineering, University of Bristol, U.K. (In the frame of Erasmus project for the final year thesis, under the supervision of Prof. R. D. Adams) 1995 - 2000 Research assistant, Dept. Mechanical Engineering and Aeronautics, University of Patras. LANGUAGES English, Greek, French COMMUNITY ACTIVITIES (Member of) Council of the European Society of Composite Materials (ESCM) Council of the European Society of Experimental Mechanics (EuraSEM) The European Structural Integrity Society (ESIS) The European Energy Research Alliance (EERA, JP WIND) The Technical Chamber of Greece (TCG) The Hellenic Association of Mechanical & Electrical Engineers SCIENTIFIC-RESEARCH INTERESTS Experimental methods for the study of the behavior of composite materials under static and fatigue loading Development of analytical methods for the study of the behavior of FRP composite materials under variable amplitude complex stress states Development of fatigue life prediction methodologies for composite materials and structures Design of constructions with composite materials Samy BengioExpertise
Large Language ModelsReasoningStatistical machine learningSpeech processingPerson authenticationMultimodal processingSequence processingArtificial neural networks, support vector machinesHidden markov models, gaussian mixture modelsetc
Expertise
Large Language ModelsReasoningStatistical machine learningSpeech processingPerson authenticationMultimodal processingSequence processingArtificial neural networks, support vector machinesHidden markov models, gaussian mixture modelsetc
Mission
Samy Bengio
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.
Emmanuel AbbéTeaching & PhD PhD Students Denys Pushkin, Ortal Yona Senouf, Vladyslav Shashkov Past EPFL PhD Students Elisabetta Cornacchia, Aryo Lotfi Courses Reasoning in artificial intelligence MATH-700 Large language models have raised the potential of artificial intelligence in various applications, including science and mathematics, but their reasoning capabilities remain under investigations. This class focuses on defining, measuring and improving the reasoning capabilities of such AI models.
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Claudio BruschiniClaudio Bruschini holds an MSc in high energy physics from the University of Genova and a PhD in Applied Sciences from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB). He started his career with INFN (Italy, 1993), in the WA92 CERN collaboration (particle physics), and then moved to CERN as a Fellow in the European GP-MIMD2 project, attached to the NA48 collaboration (particle physics, parallel programming, 1994-1995). He then started his close collaboration with EPFL, first in the DeTeC (Demining Technology Center) project (sensors for landmine detection/humanitarian demining, 1996-1997). After DeTeC's end, he started the first of a series of fruitful collaborations with the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB) on humanitarian demining related R&D (1998). This was followed by the EUDEM survey project (The European Union in Humanitarian Demining, 1998), the EUDEM2 three year EC sponsored support measure (www.eudem.info, 2001-2004), and the DELVE support action (www.delve.vub.ac.be, 2007). In parallel he started working within the EPFL's AQUA group (Advanced Quantum Architectures, Edoardo Charbon), on topics as diverse as ultrasonic sensors for in-air application, optical 3D and high speed 2D sensing, sensor networks, or tracking/motion capture systems, in particular for the preparation of research projects. This culminated in the European MEGAFRAME (www.megaframe.eu, FP6, 2006-2010, SPAD arrays and related in-pixel time stamping electronics in deep submicron CMOS technology) and SPADnet (www.spadnet.eu, FP7, 2010-2014, networked SPAD arrays for Positron Emission Tomography) projects, coordinated by EPFL-AQUA. As from 2009 he also worked with Dario Floreano on the management of the CURVACE Curved Artificial Compound Eyes FP7 project (www.curvace.org), coordinated by EPFL-LIS. He was also active with CHUV (Lausanne University Hospital) within EndoTOFPET-US (endoscopic PET) as well as on a CTI project devoted to the development of a new hand-held standalone tool for tracer-guided medical procedures. In 2014 he had also the pleasure of joining the EPFL ICLAB of Christian Enz during its ramp-up phase, collaborating on device related topics (SNF GigaRadMOST) and biomedical R&D (NanoTera WiseSkin). Claudio is now fully with EPFL’s Advanced Quantum Architecture (AQUA). He has also been active as independent scientific consultant, under the label CBR Scientific Consulting, on the preparation of (European) R&D project proposals and the execution of individual studies, and worked in 2006 for a local start-up as operations manager and R&D advisor.... but this is another story. An unauthorized early biography is available at http://lami.epfl.ch/team/claudiob/... Edoardo CharbonEdoardo Charbon (SM’00 F’17) received the Elektrotechnik Diploma from ETH Zurich, the M.S. from the University of California at San Diego, and the Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley in 1988, 1991, and 1995, respectively, all in electrical engineering and EECS. He has consulted with numerous organizations, including Bosch, X-Fab, Texas Instruments, Maxim, Sony, Agilent, and the Carlyle Group. He was with Cadence Design Systems from 1995 to 2000, where he was the architect of the company's initiative on information hiding for intellectual property protection. In 2000, he joined Canesta Inc., as the Chief Architect, where he led the development of wireless 3-D CMOS image sensors. Since 2002 he has been a member of the faculty of EPFL, where is a full professor since 2015. From 2008 to 2016 he was full professor and chair at the Delft University of Technology, where he spearheaded the university's effort on cryogenic electronics for quantum computing as part of QuTech. He has been the driving force behind the creation of deep-submicron CMOS SPAD technology, which is mass-produced since 2015 and is present in smartphones, telemeters, proximity sensors, and medical diagnostics tools. His interests span from 3-D vision, LiDAR, FLIM, FCS, NIROT to super-resolution microscopy, time-resolved Raman spectroscopy, and cryo-CMOS circuits and systems for quantum computing. He has authored or co-authored over 400 papers and two books, and he holds 23 patents. Dr. Charbon is a distinguished visiting scholar of the W. M. Keck Institute for Space at Caltech, a fellow of the Kavli Institute of Nanoscience Delft, a distinguished lecturer of the IEEE Photonics Society, and a fellow of the IEEE.
Aleksandra RadenovicFrom April 2021 Full Professor 2015 -2021 Associate Professor2008-2015 Tenure-Track Assistant Professor2004-2007 Postdoc at the University of California, Berkeley in the group of Prof.Liphardt2003 PhD student of Prof. Dietler in Laboratory of Physics of Living Matter, University of Lausanne 1999 Diploma thesis on the subject of the Raman spectroscopy of beta carotene1994-1999 Physics department at the University of Zagreb1994 baccalaureate, Classical gymnasium
Ian SmithPhD, Cambridge University, 1982 Interests 1 Active shape control for structures for deployment and where serviceability criteria governs 2 Biomimetic structures (learning, self-diagnosis, self-repair) 3 Infrastructure management support through structural identification 4 Advanced computer-aided engineering applications of stochastic optimization and search, multi-criteria analysis, system uncertainties (measurement and modelling), multi-modal approaches (combining statistics with behavior models) More details : see https://www.epfl.ch/labs/imac/research/iansmith/ Bernd DomerTeaching & PhD Courses Numerical representation / BIM CIVIL-307 The course covers building information modeling (BIM) for civil engineers.It integrates the topics of model exchange, collaborative work as well as project management and links them to the BIM methodology.Examples help to understand underlying concepts and to identify potential applications.
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.
Stéphanie LacourStéphanie P. Lacour holds the Bertarelli Foundation Chair in Neuroprosthetic Technology in the School of Engineering at EPFL and leads the Laboratory for Soft Bioelectronic Interfaces. She received her PhD in Electrical Engineering from INSA de Lyon, France, and completed postdoctoral research at Princeton University and the University of Cambridge. She is the recipient of the 2006 MIT TR35, a University Research Fellowship of the Royal Society, European Research Council ERC Starting and POC Grants, and a SNSF-ERC Consolidator Grant. She was elected a 2015 Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum.
Petr MotlicekTeaching & PhD PhD Students Shashi Kumar Past EPFL PhD Students as codirector Subhadeep Dey, Weipeng He, Juan Pablo Zuluaga Gomez Courses Digital Speech and Audio Coding EE-719 The goal of this course is to introduce the engineering students state-of-the-art speech and audio coding techniques with an emphasis on the integration of knowledge about sound production and auditory perception through signal processing techniques.
