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.
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.
Mika Tapani GöösWebsite
https://theory.epfl.ch/mika/
Teaching & PhD PhD Students Valentin Imbach, Ziyi Guan, Artur Riazanov, Anastasiia Sofronova, Weiqiang Yuan Past EPFL PhD Students Maystre Gilbert Théodore Courses Computational complexity CS-524 In computational complexity we study the computational resources needed to solve problems and understand the relation between different types of computation. This course advances the students knowledge of computational complexity, and develop an understanding o Serge VaudenaySerge Vaudenay entered at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in 1989 with a major in mathematics. He earned his agrégation (secondary teaching degree) in mathematics in 1992, then a PhD in Computer Science at the University of Paris 7 - Denis Diderot in 1995. He subsequently became a senior research fellow at the CNRS, prior to being granted his habilitation à diriger des recherches (a postdoctoral degree authorizing the recipient to supervise doctoral students). In 1999, he was appointed as a Professor at the EPFL, where he created the Security and Cryptography Laboratory.
Shashwat ShrivastavaI am a Ph.D. student at EPFL, advised by Dr. Mirjana Stojilović. I am broadly interested in FPGA architecture and Computer-Aided Design. My research is focused on reducing the compile time for FPGAs by incorporating architectural enhancements and rethinking CAD algorithms.
Mirjana StojilovicMirjana Stojilović received the Dipl. Ing. and Ph.D. degrees from the School of Electrical Engineering, University of Belgrade, in 2006 and 2013, respectively. From 2010 to 2013, she was collaborating with the Processor Architecture Laboratory at EPFL, visiting periodically as a Guest Researcher. From 2013 to 2016, she was working at the University of Applied Sciences Western Switzerland as a senior researcher, and at EPFL as a lecturer. She joined Parallel Systems Architecture Lab at EPFL in October 2016. Mirjana's main research interests include electronic design automation, reconfigurable computing, electromagnetic-compatibility and signal-integrity issues, and hardware security. Mirjana Stojilović serves on the program committee of the FPGA, FPL, and FCCM conferences and as a reviewer for IEEE TCAD, TVLSI, TC, TEMC, IEEE Access and ACM TRETS. She received the Best Paper Award at 2016 International Symposium on Electromagnetic Compatibility (EMC Europe 2016), Young Scientist Award at 33rd International Conference on Lightning Protection (ICLP2016), and the Young Author Best Paper Award at the 20th Telecommunication Forum in Belgrade (TELFOR 2012). In 2015, the EPFL School of Computer and Communication Sciences (IC) presented her with the Teaching Award.
Rüdiger UrbankeRüdiger L. Urbanke obtained his Dipl. Ing. degree from the Vienna University of Technology, Austria in 1990 and the M.Sc. and PhD degrees in Electrical Engineering from Washington University in St. Louis, MO, in 1992 and 1995, respectively. He held a position at the Mathematics of Communications Department at Bell Labs from 1995 till 1999 before becoming a faculty member at the School of Computer & Communication Sciences (I&C) of EPFL. He is a member of the Information Processing Group. He is principally interested in the analysis and design of iterative coding schemes, which allow reliable transmission close to theoretical limits at low complexities. Such schemes are part of most modern communications standards, including wireless transmission, optical communication and hard disk storage. More broadly, his research focuses on the analysis of graphical models and the application of methods from statistical physics to problems in communications. From 2000-2004 he was an Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory and he is currently on the board of the series "Foundations and Trends in Communications and Information Theory." In 2017 he was President of the Information Theory Society. From 2009 till 2012 he was the head of the I&C doctoral school, in 2013 he served as Dean a. i. of I&C, and since 2016 he is the Associated Dean for teaching of I&C. He is a co-author of the book "Modern Coding Theory" published by Cambridge University Press. Awards: 2021 IEEE Information Theory Society Paper Award 2016 STOC Best Paper Award 2014 La Polysphere Teaching Award 2014 IEEE Hamming Medal 2013 IEEE Information Theory Society Paper Award 2011 MASCO Best Paper Award 2011 IEEE Koji Kobayashi Award 2009 La Polysphere Teaching Award 2002 IEEE Information Theory Society Paper Award Fulbright Scholarship My students have won the following awards: M. Mondelli, 2021 IEEE Information Theory Paper Award M. Mondelli, EPFL Doctorate Award 2018 M. Mondelli, Patrick Denantes Award, 2017 M. Mondelli, IEEE IT Society Student Paper Award at ISIT, 2015 M. Mondelli, Dan David Prize Scholarship, 2015 H. Hassani, Inaugural Thomas Cover Dissertation Award, 2014 S. Kudekar, 2013 & 2021 IEEE Information Theory Paper Award A. Karbasi, Patrick Denantes Award, 2013 V. Venkatesan, Best Paper Award at MASCOTS, 2011 A. Karbasi, Best Student Paper Award at ICASSP, 2011 (with R. Parhizkar) A. Karbasi, Best Student Paper Award at ACM SIGMETRICS, 2010 (with S. Oh) S. Korada, ABB Dissertation Award, 2010 S. Korada, IEEE IT Society Student Paper Award at ISIT, 2009 (with E. Sasoglu) S. Korada, IEEE IT Society Student Paper Award at ISIT, 2008
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.
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.
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.
Giovanni De MicheliExpertise
Design technologies for integrated systems on silicon, such as synthesis, hw/sw codesign and low-power design, as well as systems on heterogeneous platforms including electrical and biological components.
Scientific Director of EcoCloud Center at EPFL
Directing activities towards creating sustainable computation including AI.Designing energy-savvy data centers and edge devices.
More information
Please read http://si2.epfl.ch/~demichel/
Giovanni De Micheli is a research scientist in electronics and 