Lenka ZdeborováLenka Zdeborová is a Professor of Physics and of Computer Science in École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne where she leads the Statistical Physics of Computation Laboratory. She received a PhD in physics from University Paris-Sud and from Charles University in Prague in 2008. She spent two years in the Los Alamos National Laboratory as the Director's Postdoctoral Fellow. Between 2010 and 2020 she was a researcher at CNRS working in the Institute of Theoretical Physics in CEA Saclay, France. In 2014, she was awarded the CNRS bronze medal, in 2016 Philippe Meyer prize in theoretical physics and an ERC Starting Grant, in 2018 the Irène Joliot-Curie prize, in 2021 the Gibbs lectureship of AMS. She is an editorial board member for Journal of Physics A, Physical Review E, Physical Review X, SIMODS, Machine Learning: Science and Technology, and Information and Inference. Lenka's expertise is in applications of concepts from statistical physics, such as advanced mean field methods, replica method and related message-passing algorithms, to problems in machine learning, signal processing, inference and optimization. She enjoys erasing the boundaries between theoretical physics, mathematics and computer science.
Sanidhya KashyapSanidhya Kashyap is a systems researcher and an assistant professor at the EPFL School of Computer and Communication Sciences (IC). His research focuses on designing systems software that are performant and robust for heterogeneous hardware. He is broadly interested in the area of systems with a particular focus on operating systems, databases, concurrency, scheduling, networks, data analytics, and software testing (fuzzing).
Mirko MarrasMirko Marras was born on April 19, 1992 in Iglesias (Italy). He is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Digital Vocational Education and Training • Machine Learning for Education Laboratory of EPFL - Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (Switzerland). He received a PhD in Computer Science in 2020 and a MSc Degree in Computer Science (summa cum laude, 18 months) in 2016, from University of Cagliari (Italy). He received the Computer Science Engineering certification from the University of Pisa (Italy) in 2016.
In 2015, he was involved as Researcher within UnitelCagliari (Italy) for the ELIOS project (MIUR, 1ME). In 2017, he spent five months as Visiting Scholar at EURECAT (Spain), collaborating with the Data Science and Big Data Analytics Unit on the DECODE project (EU, 16P, 5ME). In 2018, he spent three months as Visiting Scholar within the University Institute for Intelligent Systems and Digital Applications in Engineering (SIANI) at the Universidad de Las Palmas de Gran Canaria (Spain). In 2019, he spent two months at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering of the New York University: Tandon School of Engineering (U.S.A). He has been involved as Researcher in the ILEARNTV project (MIUR, 6P, 10ME) since 2018. From 2019, he is referral of the University of Cagliari (Italy) for two work packages under the EDUC project (EU, 6P, 5ME). He has been teaching assistant for the “Computer Networks” course since 2017 and thesis assistant since 2018 at the University of Cagliari (Italy).
In 2014, he was recognized as the best third-year student of the BSc Program in Computer Science of the University of Cagliari (Italy). In 2016, he was recognized as the best MSc student of the Faculty of Science and one of the top 12 MSc students of the same University. In 2018, he got to the podium of the Call for Visionary Ideas - Education Section event organized by Nesta Italia. He has received the Best Poster Award at the European Semantic Web Conference 2017 (ESWC2017), the Demo Honorable Mention at The Web Conference 2018 (WWW2018) and the Best Paper Award at Didamatica Conference 2018. He has been awarded two Erasmus PlaceDoc scholaships to spend 5 months at EURECAT (Spain) and 3 months at Universidad de Las Palmas de Gran Canaria (Spain), respectively. Moreover, he has been awarded a GlobusDoc scholarship to spend 2 months at New York University: Tandon School of Engineering (U.S.A).
His current research focuses on Data Mining and Machine Learning with a focus on Education. He has co-authored papers in top-tier international journals, such as Pattern Recognition Letters (Elsevier), Computers in Human Behavior (Elsevier), Information Processing & Management (Elsevier), and IEEE Cloud Computing. His research activity also brought him to give talks (e.g., ECIR 2019 and INTERSPEECH 2019), demos (e.g., TheWebConf 2018 and AVI 2020), and tutorials (e.g., UMAP 2020 and ICDM 2020) at several international conferences. He is part of the program committee of main international conferences, such as ACL, AIED, ECML-PKDD, EDM, EMNLP, ITICSE, INTERSPEECH, ICALT, and UMAP. He has been also acting as a reviewer for top-tier journals, such as Pattern Recognition Letters and IEEE Transactions on Image Processing. He has been also co-chairing the BIAS@ECIR2020 and BIAS@ECIR2021 workshops. He has served as a guest editor for a special issue of Information Processing & Management (Elsevier) and Future Generation Compter Systems (Elsevier). He has been involved in several national and European projects (e.g., iLearnTV, DECODE, EDUC). He is a member of several national and international associations, including CVPL, AIxIA, IEEE, and ACM.
Georgios VernikosI am a first-year Ph.D. student at the Electrical Engineering department at EPFL and a research assistant at HEIG-VD, in Switzerland. My Ph.D. advisor is Andrei Popescu-Belis. I am interested in machine translation and monolingual/multilingual language models.Before coming to Switzerland, I obtained my diploma (combined BEng and MEng) in Electrical and Computer Engineering and my MSc in Data Science and Machine Learning from the National Technical University of Athens in Athens, Greece. In my Master’s thesis I worked on Adversarial Fine-Tuning of Pretrained Language Models under the supervision of Andreas Stafylopatis. I was also working as a Machine Learning Engineer at the Greek startup DeepSea Technologies for 1.5 years.
