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.
Pierre-André FarinePierre-André Farine received the Doctoral and Engineering Degrees in Microtechnology from University of Neuchâtel, Switzerland, respectively in 1984 and 1978, and the Engineering in Microtechnology from ETS Le Locle in 1974.
He was working 17 years for the Swiss watch industries (Swatch Group), including developments for high-tech products, such as pager watches, watches including integrated sensors such as pressure, compass, altimeter and temperature sensors for Tissot. He was also involved in prototypes developments for watches including GPS and cellular GSM phones.
Since 8 years, he is Professor in Electronics and Signal Processing at the Institute of Microtechnology IMT, University of Neuchâtel, Switzerland. Full professor at EPFL since January 1st, 2009, he works in the field of low-power integrated products for portable devices, including microelectronics for wireless telecommunications, UWB and GNSS systems. He is Head of the Electronics and Signal Processing Laboratory ESPLAB of the EPFL IMT-NE. His laboratory works also for video and audio compression algorithms and their implementation in low power integrated circuits.
Nicolas GrandjeanNicolas Grandjean received a PhD degree in physics from the University ofNice Sophia Antipolis in 1994 and shortly thereafter joined the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) as a permanent staff member. In 2004, he was appointed tenure-track assistant professor at the École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) where he created the Laboratory for advanced semiconductors for photonics and electronics. He was promoted to full professor in 2009. He was the director of the Institute of Condensed Matter Physics from 2012 to 2016 and then moved to the University of California at Santa Barbara where he spent 6 months as a visiting professor. Since 2018, he is the head of the School of Physics at the EPFL. He was awarded the Sandoz Family Foundation Grant for Academic Promotion, received the “Nakamura Lecturer” Award in 2010, the "Quantum Devices Award” at the 2017 Compound Semiconductor Week, and “2016 best teacher” award from the EPFL Physics School. His research interests are focused on the physics of nanostructures and III-V nitride semiconductor quantum photonics.
Vassily HatzimanikatisDr. Vassily Hatzimanikatis is currently Associate Professor of Chemical Engineering and Bioengineering at Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL), in Lausanne, Switzerland. Vassily received a PhD and an MS in Chemical Engineering from the California Institute of Technology, and his Diploma in Chemical Engineering from the University of Patras, in Greece. After the completion of his doctoral studies, he held a research group leader position at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETHZ), Switzerland. Prior to joining EPFL, Vassily worked for three years in DuPont, Cargill, and Cargill Dow, and he has been assistant professor at Northwestern University, at Illinois, USA.
Vassilys research interests are in the areas of computational systems biology, biotechnology, and complexity. He is associate editor of the journals Biotechnology & Bioengineering, Metabolic Engineering and Integrative Biology, and he serves on the editorial advisory board of the journals Bioprocess and Biosystems Engineering, Journal of Chemical Technology and Biotechnology, and Industrial Biotechnology. He has written over 70 technical publications and he is co-inventor in three patents and patent applications.
Vassily is a fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (2010), he was a DuPont Young Professor (2001-2004), and he has also received the Jay Bailey Young Investigator Award in Metabolic Engineering (2000), and the ACS Elmar Gaden Award (2011).
Amir Roshan ZamirAmir Zamir is a Tenure-Track Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL). Prior to EPFL, he spent time at Stanford, UC Berkeley, and UCF. His research interests are broadly in computer vision, machine learning, perception-for-robotics, and AI. He has been recognized with CVPR (2018) Best Paper Award, CVPR (2016) Best Student Paper Award, CVPR (2020) Best Paper Award Nomination, and NVIDIA Pioneering Research Award (2018), among others. His research has been covered by various press outlets, such as The New York Times or Forbes.
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 Olivier MartinOlivier J.F. Martin received the M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in physics in 1989 and 1994, respectively, from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland. In 1989, he joined IBM Zurich Research Laboratory, where he investigated thermal and optical properties of semiconductor laser diodes. Between 1994 and 1997 he was a research staff member at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich (ETHZ). In 1997 he received a Lecturer fellowship from the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF). During the period 1996-1999, he spent a year and a half in the U.S.A., as invited scientist at the University of California in San Diego (UCSD). In 2001 he received a Professorship grant from the SNSF and became Professor of Nano-Optics at the ETHZ. In 2003, he was appointed Professor of Nanophotonics and Optical Signal Processing at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Lausanne (EPFL), where he is currently head of the Nanophotonics and Metrology Laboratory and Director of the Microengineering Section.
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.
Guillaume AnciauxResearchResearch Topics My research can be decomposed in three main blocks:First, the main goal of my current research is the physical description of contact interactions. I performed numerous studies of this topic using different models from the continuum scale down to atomistic scale. Since atomic phenomena and macroscopic observations are linked, the physics of contact needs the simultaneous consideration of several scales. For instance, plasticity is a theory defined for the macroscopic scale whereas t
Jean-François MolinariProfessor J.F. Molinari is the director of the Computational Solid Mechanics Laboratory (http://lsms.epfl.ch) at EPFL, Switzerland. He holds an appointment in the Civil Engineering institute, which he directed from 2013 to 2017, and a joint appointment in the Materials Science institute. He started his tenure at EPFL in 2007, and was promoted to Full Professor in 2012. He is currently an elected member of the Research Council of the Swiss National Science Foundation in Division 2 (Mathematics, Natural and Engineering Sciences), and co editor in chief of the journal Mechanics of Materials. J.F. Molinari graduated from Caltech, USA, in 2001, with a M.S. and Ph.D. in Aeronautics. He held professorships in several countries besides Switzerland, including the United States with a position in Mechanical Engineering at the Johns Hopkins University (2000-2006), and France at Ecole Normale Supérieure Cachan in Mechanics (2005-2007), as well as a Teaching Associate position at the Ecole Polytechnique de Paris (2006-2009). The work conducted by Prof. Molinari and his collaborators takes place at the frontier between traditional disciplines and covers several length scales from atomistic to macroscopic scales. Over the years, Professor Molinari and his group have been developing novel multiscale approaches for a seamless coupling across scales. The activities of the laboratory span the domains of damage mechanics of materials and structures, nano- and microstructural mechanical properties, and tribology. Duccio TestaProfessionals experiences Supply teacher of mathematics, physics and computing 1994–1995 various high schools in Torino (Italy)
Teaching & PhD Past EPFL PhD Students as codirector Theodoros Panis, Lorenzo Stipani Courses Sustainable energy innovation HUM-292 This course provides an introduction to the technical, social, and economic fundamentals of energy. The course examines the concrete case of nuclear fusion. How could this energy reshape our world? How can we ensure its acceptability, st
