Denis GilletDenis Gillet received the Diploma in Electrical Engineering from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL) in 1988, and the Ph.D. degree in Information Systems also from the EPFL in 1995. During 1992 he was appointed as Research Fellow at the Information Systems Laboratory of Stanford University in the United States. He is currently Maître d'enseignement et de recherche at the EPFL School of Engineering, where he leads the React research group. His current research interests include Technologies Enhanced Learning (TEL), Human Computer Interaction (HCI), Human Devices Interaction (HDI) and Optimal Coordination of Complex and Distributed Systems. Denis Gillet is affiliated at EPFL with the Center for Intelligent Systems and the Center for Digital Education.
Savvas SaloustrosEducation PhD | Construction Engineering 2017 – 2017 UPC-BarcelonaTech, Spain MSc | Structural Analysis of Monuments and Historical Constructions (SAHC) 2013 – 2013 University of Padova, Italy & UPC-BarcelonaTech, Spain Diploma | Civil Engineering 2012 – 2012 National Technical University of Athens, Greece Professionals experiences Co-founder & Board Member 2019–2019 FENECStructural Engineer 2019–2019 Windmill Structural Constultants, Barcel
Barbara GalimbertiExpertise
Archival science, collections management, and information sciences applied to architectural archives and to heritage and research collections, within the Archives of Modern Construction (ACM) of the École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne.Standardized archival description, metadata structuring and governance, dissemination of finding aids, and development of digital infrastructures for long-term preservation and access (Morphé / AtoM + Archivematica ; MorphéPlus).Intellectual and physical process
Isabella Di LenardoPh.D. in Theories and Art History. Isabella di Lenardo is senior scientist in Digital Humanities and Urban History. Her research activity is focused on digital tools and methods applied to Urban History. She is an expert in ancient cartography, city representations, cadastral sources interpreted through digital modeling, extraction and analysis systems.She's also interested in network analysis questioning the production and circulation of artistic and architectural knowledge in Europe XVIth – XVIIIth centuries in particular on North-South relationships and influences. The development of collaboration projects with European institutions and the activity carried out on various initiatives supported by the European Commission have allowed her to acquire specialism in the field of science applied to heritage, developing in particular specific skills for the enhancement of Cultural Heritage through digital tools. She leads projects in collaboration with Bibliothèque national de France (Paris), Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art (Paris), Ecole nationale des chartes (Paris), Université Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne, Centre Allemand d’Histoire de l’Art (Paris), Musée du Louvre, Archives Nationales de Paris, Bibliothèque Historique de la Ville de Paris, Réunion des Musées Nationaux. She supervised all the urban modeling simulations for the Venice Time Machine project and acted as content curator for all the exhibitions (Venice Biennale, Grand Palais-Paris, Datasquare - ArtLab-Lausanne, Museo Correr-Venice). She was Head of “Replica” project : digitizing 1 million photos of artworks in the Fondazione Giorgio Cini (Venice) and visual patterns extraction through a search engine for visual similarities. She has a Ph.D in Art History and also studied Archaeology and Urban Studies. She has published essays and articles about Venetian Art and Urban History and participated in many Art exhibitions in European museums. She coordinated summer schools and workshops about Digital Tools for Art History and Urban History. She attended conferences on digital methods for History in universities and patrimonial institutions.
Paola ViganòTeaching & PhD PhD Students Noélie Marion Charlotte Lecoanet, Shyam Sunder Sirimalla Past EPFL PhD Students Roberto Sega, Antoine Vialle, Tommaso Pietropolli, Sylvie Tram Nguyen, Anna Karla De Almeida Milani, Elena Calafati, Flore Jeanne Marie Andrea Guichot Courses Hidden rivers PENS-219 Hidden Rivers aims at fulfilling the need for an interdisciplinary understanding of the problematics surrounding urban streams, through ecological, hydrological, and spatial relationships found in riversc
Gabriela Tejada GuerreroGabriela has extensive expertise in international cooperation in education, research and innovation. She joined EPFL as scientist at the Cooperation and Development Center (CODEV) where she led the EPFL Leading House Program (2014-2017) of the Swiss government, which upheld Swiss bilateral research cooperation with Brazil, India, Vietnam and Latin America. Her research focused on scientific diasporas and skilled migration with diverse international collaborations under her leadership. She worked at the University of Zurich, and the UNDP in Moldova and Geneva, and taught at the Monterrey Institute of Technology (ITESM). She was visiting researcher at the CES at Harvard University and the CIS at ETH Zurich. Gabriela obtained a BA in International Relations from the UIA (Ibero) in Mexico, and a PhD in Political Sciences from the UAB in Barcelona. She obtained a CAS IPA - International Policy and Advocacy of the D-MTEC, ETH Zurich (2019). Since 2020 Gabriela is Vice-President of the Swiss Commission for UNESCO (member since 2016), where she promotes science-society linkages and advocates for an inclusive development and dialogue through education, science and culture.Since May 2019, Gabriela is Academic Deputy at the Direction of the College of Humanities (CDH). She serves the Scholars at Risk program (SAR) at EPFL in an advisory capacity.
Giovanni D'AngeloTeaching & PhD PhD Students Mélissa Ruiz, Gary Domeniconi, Irmak Kaysudu, Alessandro Valente, Surayyo Akramkhanova, Jean Andrea Maillat, Linda Wedemann, Manel Leila Nadia Boussouf, Jiayan Lin, Nika Gorsek, Christina Ulrich, William Daniel Chan-Ha Verdier Past EPFL PhD Students Laura Capolupo, Jaipreet Singh Loomba, Halima Hannah Emilie Schede Past EPFL PhD Students as codirector Muhammad Umair Anwar Courses Biological chemistry II BIO-213 Biochemistry is a key discipline in the Life Scienc
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]
Dominique BonvinDominique Bonvin is Professor and Director of the Automatic Control Laboratory of EPFL. He received his Diploma in Chemical Engineering from ETH Zürich, and his Ph.D. degree from the University of California, Santa Barbara. He worked in the field of process control for the Sandoz Corporation in Basel and with the Systems Engineering Group of ETH Zürich. He joined the EPFL in 1989, where his current research interests include modeling, control and optimization of dynamic systems. He served as Director of the Automatic Control Laboratory for the periods 1993-97, 2003-2007 and again since 2012, Head of the Mechanical Engineering Department in 1995-97 and Dean of Bachelor and Master Studies at EPFL for the period 2004-2011.
Pascal FrossardTeaching & PhD PhD Students Yiming Qin, Alba Carballo Castro, Elisa Messori, Ke Wang, Sevda Ögüt, Tuna Alikasifoglu, William Cappelletti, Manuel Madeira, Mahdi Amiri, Ortal Yona Senouf, Vasiliki Rizou, Cem Bilaloglu, Abdellah Rahmani, Amel Abdelraheem, Jérémy Jean Philippe Baffou, Adam Hazimeh, Vincent Jung, Yike Zhao Past EPFL PhD Students Dan Jurca, Jean-Paul Wagner, Ivana Radulovic, Ivana Tosic, Effrosyni Kokiopoulou, Zafer Arican, Vijayaraghavan Thirumalai, Tamara Tosic, Eirina Bourtsoulatze, Elif Vur
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.
David Michael Volpe RuggieroTeaching & PhD PhD Students Ömer Faruk Behçet, Elias Merhi, Enrico Pinelli, Ahmad Abdulrahman Ahmad Majdouba, Muhammad Mahmood Mohi Ud Din Courses Reinforced concrete structures CIVIL-323 This course introduces the student to the behaviour and design of reinforced concrete structures. The student will learn the principles of analysis of reinforced concrete and how to design common concrete elements including columns, beams, and slabs. Reinforced concrete structures - advanced topics
Marion LeleuExpertise
Bioinformatics, Genomics, High-Throughput Sequencing, Data Mining
Mission
Provide advanced and personalised support and consulting in bioinformatics and biostatistics for the scientific community of EPFL, UNIL, and other Institutes.Her main areas of interest and expertise include but are not limited to, genomics, transcriptomics and epigenetics, with a strong interest in integrating multiple modalities, and choosing the appropriate statistical models, to gain a comprehensive understanding of compl
Anne-Laure Mahul MellierExpertise
Cellular Biology: Cell culture of mammalian cell lines (U2OS, N2a, M17, SH-S5Y5, Cos, HeLa, HEK, MCF7), Astrocytic and neuronal primary cultures (hippocampus, cortex, striatum, midbrain) from P0 mouse or rat pups or from E16-E19 mice embryos, iPSC neuronal cultures (proliferation, passaging, differentiation in iNeurons or iDopaminergic neurons), Cellular transfection (DNA plasmid, siRNA, shRNA), Lentiviruses production and infection of neuronal primary cultures or mammalian cell lines, Samples pre
Graham KnottGraham Knott received his degree in physiology from the University of Southampton, UK, in 1990, and his PhD in neuroscience from the University of Tasmania, Australia, in 1995. He moved to the University of Lausanne in Switzerland in 1999 where he researched the plasticity of neuronal connectivity in the adult brain, developing correlative light and electron microscopy methods for the analysis of in vivo imaged neurons. In 2006 Graham joined the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, establishing the Bio Electron Microscopy Facility and has continued his research interests in brain plasticity and 3D electron microscopy.
