Guillaume Romain ObozinskiGuillaume Obozinski is Deputy Chief Data Scientist at the Swiss Data Science Center. He graduated with a PhD in Statistics from UC Berkeley in 2009. He did his postdoc and held until 2012 a researcher position in the Willow and Sierra teams at INRIA and Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris. He was then Research Faculty at Ecole des Ponts ParisTech until 2018. Guillaume has broad interests in statistics and machine learning and worked over time on sparse modeling, optimization for large scale learning, graphical models, relational learning and semantic embeddings, with applications in various domains from computational biology to computer vision.
Fabrizio SossanExpertise
Mathematical Modelling, Forecasting and Optimization for Power System Applications
Current work
He is currently working on (i) forecasting of the electrical load in application to real-time control of micro-grids and (ii) planning and development of the power system infrastructure under an increased penetration of distributed generation.
Fabrizio is an Italian citizen and was born in Genova on 9th April 1985. He got his B.Sc. and M.Sc. in Computer Engineering from the University of Genova in 2007
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.
Volkan CevherVolkan Cevher received the B.Sc. (valedictorian) in electrical engineering from Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey, in 1999 and the Ph.D. in electrical and computer engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, GA in 2005. He was a Research Scientist with the University of Maryland, College Park from 2006-2007 and also with Rice University in Houston, TX, from 2008-2009. Currently, he is an Associate Professor at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne and a Faculty Fellow in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at Rice University. His research interests include machine learning, signal processing theory, optimization theory and methods, and information theory. Dr. Cevher is an ELLIS fellow and was the recipient of the Google Faculty Research award in 2018, the IEEE Signal Processing Society Best Paper Award in 2016, a Best Paper Award at CAMSAP in 2015, a Best Paper Award at SPARS in 2009, and an ERC CG in 2016 as well as an ERC StG in 2011.
Drazen DujicDrazen Dujic is an Associate Professor and Head of the Power Electronics Laboratory at EPFL. He received the Dipl.Ing. and MSc degrees from the University of Novi Sad, Serbia in 2002 and 2005, respectively, and the PhD degree from Liverpool John Moores University, UK in 2008. From 2003 to 2006, he was a Research Assistant with the Faculty of Technical Sciences at University of Novi Sad. From 2006 to 2009, he was a Research Associate with Liverpool John Moores University. After that he moved to industry and joined ABB Switzerland Ltd, where from 2009 to 2013, he was Scientist and then Principal Scientist with ABB Corporate Research Center in Baden-Dättwil, and from 2013 to 2014 he was R&D Platform Manager with ABB Medium Voltage Drives in Turgi. He joined EPFL in 2014 as Tenure Track Assistant Professor and was promoted to Associate Professor in 2021. His research interests include the areas of design and control of advanced high power electronic systems and high-performance drives, predominantly for the medium voltage applications related to electrical energy generation, conversion and storage. He has authored or coauthored more than 150 scientific publications and has filed 16 patents. In 2018 he received EPE Outstanding Service Award from European Power Electronics and Drives Association and in 2014 the Isao Takahashi Power Electronics Award for Outstanding Achievement in Power Electronics. He is Senior Member of IEEE, and serves as Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Power Electronics, IEEE Transactions on Industrial Electronics and IET Electric Power Applications. He is Chairman of the Swiss IEEE Power Electronics Society (PELS) Chapter and IEEE PELS R8 Chair.
Mohamad Baker DiaI am currently a data scientist and machine learning course developer at the EPFL Extension School, where I am involved in the production of online learning materials, designing and leading workshops and hackathons, and promoting the EPFL Extension School data science and digital skills to a wide audience.My interests include different aspects of machine learning, coding and information theory, signal processing, and inference on graphical models. I received the B.E. degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering and the B.A. degree in Economics with distinctions concurrently in 2012 from the American University of Beirut (AUB), Lebanon. I received the M.Sc. degree in Communication Systems in 2014 and the Ph.D. degree in Computer and Communication Sciences in 2018 both from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL), Switzerland.Between 2018 and 2020, I was a research scientist at the Institute for Data Science (i4DS) in the University of Applied Sciences Northwestern Switzerland (FHNW), where I worked in collaboration with the European Space Agency (ESA) on the Euclid space mission. I was a visiting researcher at Nokia Bell Labs, Germany in 2017 where I worked on the design of a novel coding scheme for the high-speed fiber optical communication systems. I was also a R&D engineer at the European Technology Center of SONY, Germany in 2014 working on the standardization of digital terrestrial TV broadcasting receivers. In 2011, I did my undergraduate internship at the University of California, Berkeley U.S.A. where I contributed to the “Mobile Millennium” traffic-monitoring project.
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.
Mario PaoloneMario Paolone received the M.Sc. (with honors) and the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from the University of Bologna, Italy, in 1998 and 2002, respectively. In 2005, he was appointed assistant professor in power systems at the University of Bologna where he was with the Power Systems laboratory until 2011. In 2010, he received the Associate Professor eligibility from the Politecnico di Milano, Italy. Since 2011 he joined the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Lausanne, Switzerland, where he is now Full Professor, Chair of the Distributed Electrical Systems laboratory and Head of the Swiss Competence Center for Energy Research (SCCER) FURIES (Future Swiss Electrical infrastructure). He was co-chairperson of the technical programme committees of the 9th edition of the International Conference of Power Systems Transients (IPST 2009) and of the 2016 Power Systems Computation Conference (PSCC 2016). He was chair of the technical programme committee of the 2018 Power Systems Computation Conference (PSCC 2018). In 2013, he was the recipient of the IEEE EMC Society Technical Achievement Award. He was co-author of several papers that received the following awards: best IEEE Transactions on EMC paper award for the year 2017, in 2014 best paper award at the 13th International Conference on Probabilistic Methods Applied to Power Systems, Durham, UK, in 2013 Basil Papadias best paper award at the 2013 IEEE PowerTech, Grenoble, France, in 2008 best paper award at the International Universities Power Engineering Conference (UPEC). He was the founder Editor-in-Chief of the Elsevier journal Sustainable Energy, Grids and Networks and was Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics. His research interests are in power systems with particular reference to real-time monitoring and operation, power system protections, power systems dynamics and power system transients. Mario Paolone is author or coauthor of over 300 scientific papers published in reviewed journals and international conferences.
Michaël UnserExpertise
Image Processing, Medical Imaging, Biological Imaging, Wavelets, Splines, Multiresolution
Michael Unser is Full Professor with EPFL’s school of Engineering and the academic director of EPFL's Center for Imaging, Lausanne, Switzerland. His primary areas of investigation are signal processing, biomedical imaging and applied functional analysis. He is internationally recognized for his research contributions to sampling theory, wavelets, the use of splines for image processing, stochastic processes,
Christophe BallifChristophe Ballif is director of the Phototovoltaics and Thin Film Electronics Laboratoryb) (PV-Lab at the institute of microengineering (IMT) in Neuchâtel (part of the EPFL since 2009). The lab focus is on the science and technology of high efficiency heterojunction crystalline cells,so-called passivating contacts for solar cells, multi-junction solar cells include novel generation Perovskite on innovative optical high speed detector and on various macroelectronics application. It also deals with energy management with a focus on integration of solar electricity into the energy system. The PV-Lab has strongly contributed to technology transfer and industrialization of novel devices and full technology with numerous companies. Christophe Ballif graduated as a physicist from the EPFL in 1994, where he also obtained in 1998 his Phd degree working on novel PV materials. He accomplished his postdoctoral research at NREL (Golden, US) on compound semiconductor solar cells (CIGS and CdTe). He worked then at the Fraunhofer ISE (Ge) on crystalline silicon photovoltaics (monocrystalline and multi-crystalline) until 2003 and then at the EMPA in Thun (CH) before becoming full professor at the University of Neuchâtel IMT in 2004, taking over the chair of Prof. A. Shah. Since 2013, C.Ballif is also the director of the new CSEM PV-Center, also located in Neuchâtel. The CSEM PV-Center is focussing more on industrialisation and technology transfer in the field of solar energy, including solar electricity management and storage. At the core of the CSEM PV-center activities lies several "pilot lines" for various kinds of solar cells manufacturing, with a focus coating technologies, wet chemistry processes for crystalline silicon, metalisation techniques for solar cells, and a platform for developing "ideal packaging solutions and polymers" for PV modules. In addition, joined facitilites between CSEM and EPFL of over 800 m2 are available for modules manufacturing, measuring and accelerated aging. CSEM PV-center has also full team dedicated to storage and energy systems and operates a joined center with BFH in Biel for research on electrochemical storage. He (co-) authored over 500 journal and technical papers, as well as several patents. He is an elected member of the SATW, member of the scientific council of the Swiss AEE, and member of the board of the EPFL Energy center. In 2016, he recieved the Becquerel prize for his contributions to the field of high efficiency photovoltaics.
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/