Zhirui Xu

Roberto Castello is a senior scientist and group leader at the EPFL Laboratory of Solar Energy and Building Physics. Physicist by training, he has extensive experience in collecting, classifying and interpreting large datasets using advanced data mining techniques and statistical methods. He received his MSc (2007) in Particle Physics and PhD (2010) in Physics and Astrophysics from the University of Torino. He worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the Belgian National Research Fund (2011-2014) and at the CERN Experimental Physics Department (2015-2017) as a research fellow and data scientist. He is primary author of more than 20 peer-reviewed publications and he presented at major international conferences in the high energy physics domain. In 2018 he joined the Solar Energy and Building Physics Laboratory (LESO-PB) to work on data mining and Machine Learning techniques for the built environment and renewable energy. His main research interests are: spatio-temporal modeling of renewable energy potential, energy consumption forecasting techniques, anomaly detection, and computer vision techniques for automated classification in the built environment. He leads the group of Urban Data Mining, Intelligence and Simulation at LESO-PB and he is a member of the NRP75 Big Data project (HyEnergy) of the Swiss National Science Foundation. He is a member of the Swiss Competence Centre for Energy Research (SCCER) and deputy leader of the working group on Leveraging Ubiquitous Energy Data. He has served as a scientific committee member, workshop organizer and speaker at international conferences (ICAE 2020, Applied Machine Learning Days 2019 and 2020, CISBAT 2019 and 2021 and SDS2020). Since 2017 he is member of the Geneva 2030 Ecosystem network, promoting the United Nations agenda towards the realization of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

Aurelio Bay graduated in physics at the University of Lausanne (UNIL) in 1980 and got his PhD degree from the same institution in 1986 for a work on the determination of the axial form factor of the ? meson. He then went to Lawrence Berkeley Laboratories (LBL), USA as a post doc for two years, where he worked on the TPC/2? Electromagnetic Calorimeter and the SSC/LHC detector. He then came back to Europe and was named “Maître Assistant” at University of Geneva till 1994, where he started working at the L3 experiment of LEP at CERN. He was appointed Assistant Professor at the University of Lausanne in 1994 and Full Professor in 1998, continuing working at LEP, LEP2 and LHCb at CERN , and starting a collaboration at BELLE experiment at KEK, Tsukuba (Japan). At the University of Lausanne he was Director of the Institute of High Energy Physics, Deputy Director of the Physics Department and Deputy of the Dean of the Faculty of Sciences. In 2003, following the merge of UNIL physics department into the EPFL School of Basic Sciences, he was appointed Full Professor at Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), and Director of the EPFL Laboratory of High Energy Physics.

Since 2009

Secretary General , World Energy Council (WEC).

Since 2006

Titulary Professor , Advisor to the President of EPFL and EPFL's Energy Center on energy issues. Expertise: International energy & environment policy and strategy.

2001-2009

Senior Director , Energy Industries & Strategy at the World Economic Forum (WEF); Member of the Forum's Executive Council.

2002-2003

Lecturer , postgraduate course on "Energy Systems in an Economywide Framework", for the Master of Science in Energy Systems at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Lausanne (EPFL).

2001-2003

European Master in Applied Ethics , Ethics Centre, University of Zurich; specialisation in multi-stakeholder theory.

2000-2001

Research fellow at the Centre for Energy Policy and Economics of the Swiss Federal Institutes of Technology – co-lecturing "Socio-economic aspects of Energy Systems".

1996-2000

Dr ès Sciences , PhD thesis at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Lausanne (EPFL) and the Paul Scherrer Institute, Villigen (PSI). Domain: Modelling the links between Energy Policy, Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Economic Welfare.

1997-2000

Master (DES) in Econometrics at the University of Geneva.

1995-1997

Master of Science in Energy Systems at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Lausanne (EPFL); specialisation in Energy Economics and Management.

1995-2001

Research fellow at the Laboratory of Energy Systems of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Lausanne (EPFL).

1989-1995

Dipl. El.-Ing. , graduate studies in Electrical Engineering at the Swiss Federal Institutes of Technology, Zürich (ETHZ) (4th year in Lausanne); training/diploma thesis at the Institute of Microtechnique, University of Neuchâtel (UNINE) (solar cells research).