Olivier SchneiderAprès une thèse en physique des particules à l'Université de Lausanne, soutenue en 1989, Olivier Schneider rejoint le LBL, Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory (Californie), pour travailler sur l'expérience CDF au Tevatron de Fermilab (Illinois), d'abord au bénéfice d'une bourse de chercher débutant du Fonds National Suisse pour la Recherche Scientifique, puis comme post-doc au LBL. Il participe à la construction et à la mise en service du premier détecteur de vertex au silicium fontionnant avec succès auprès d'un collisionneur hadronique, détecteur qui a permis la découverte du sixième quark, appelé "top". Dès 1994, il revient en Europe et participe à l'expérience ALEPH au grand collisionneur électron-positon du CERN (Genève), comme boursier puis comme titulaire d'un poste de chercheur au CERN. Il se spécialise en physique des saveurs lourdes. En 1998, il est nommé professeur associé à l'Université de Lausanne, puis professeur extraordinaire à l'EPFL en 2003, et enfin professeur ordinaire à l'EPFL en 2010. Ayant participé depuis 1997 à la préparation de l'expérience LHCb au collisionneur LHC du CERN, entrée en fonction à fin 2009, il en analyse maintenant les données. Il contribue aussi depuis 2001 à l'exploitation des données enregistrées par l'expérience Belle au laboratoire KEK (Tsukuba, Japon). Ces deux expériences étudient principalement les désintégrations de hadrons contenant un quark b, ainsi que la violation de CP, c'est-à-dire le non-respect de la symétrie entre matière et antimatière.
Mohammad Amin ShokrollahiAmin Shokrollahi has worked on a variety of topics, including coding theory, computational number theory and algebra, and computational/algebraic complexity theory. He is best known for his work on iterative decoding algorithms of graph based codes, an area in which he holds a number of granted and pending patents. He is the co-inventor of Tornado codes, and the inventor of Raptor codes. His codes have been standardized and successfully deployed in practical areas dealing with data transmission over lossy networks.
Prior to joining EPFL, Amin Shokrollahi has held positions as the chief scientist of Digital Fountain, member of the technical staff at Bell Laboratories, senior researcher at the International Computer Science Insitute in Berkeley, and assistant professor at the department of computer science of the university of Bonn. He is a Fellow of the IEEE, and he was awarded the Best Paper Award of the IEEE IT Society in 2002 for his work on iterative decoding of LDPC code, the IEEE Eric Sumner Award in 2007 for the development of Fountain Codes, and the joint Communication Society/Information Theory Society best paper award of 2007 for his paper on Raptor Codes.
Anthony Christopher DavisonAnthony Davison has published on a wide range of topics in statistical theory and methods, and on environmental, biological and financial applications. His main research interests are statistics of extremes, likelihood asymptotics, bootstrap and other resampling methods, and statistical modelling, with a particular focus on the first currently. Statistics of extremes concerns rare events such as storms, high winds and tides, extreme pollution episodes, sporting records, and the like. The subject has a long history, but under the impact of engineering and environmental problems has been an area of intense development in the past 20 years. Davison''s PhD work was in this area, in a project joint between the Departments of Mathematics and Mechanical Engineering at Imperial College, with the aim of modelling potential high exposures to radioactivity due to releases from nuclear installations. The key tools developed, joint with Richard Smith, were regression models for exceedances over high thresholds, which generalized earlier work by hydrologists, and formed the basis of some important later developments. This has led to an ongoing interest in extremes, and in particular their application to environmental and financial data. A major current interest is the development of suitable methods for modelling rare spatio-temporal events, particularly but not only in the context of climate change. Likelihood asymptotics too have undergone very substantial development since 1980. Key tools here have been saddlepoint and related approximations, which can give remarkably accurate approximate distribution and density functions even for very small sample sizes. These approximations can be used for wide classes of parametric models, but also for certain bootstrap and resampling problems. The literature on these methods can seem arcane, but they are potentially widely applicable, and Davison wrote a book joint with Nancy Reid and Alessandra Brazzale intended to promote their use in applications. Bootstrap methods are now used in many areas of application, where they can provide a researcher with accurate inferences tailor-made to the data available, rather than relying on large-sample or other approximations of doubtful validity. The key idea is to replace analytical calculations of biases, variances, confidence and prediction intervals, and other measures of uncertainty with computer simulation from a suitable statistical model. In a nonparametric situation this model consists of the data themselves, and the simulation simply involves resampling from the existing data, while in a parametric case it involves simulation from a suitable parametric model. There is a wide range of possibilities between these extremes, and the book by Davison and Hinkley explores these for many data examples, with the aim of showing how and when resampling methods succeed and why they can fail. He was Editor of Biometrika (2008-2017), Joint Editor of Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, series B (2000-2003), editor of the IMS Lecture Notes Monograph Series (2007), Associate Editor of Biometrika (1987-1999), and Associate Editor of the Brazilian Journal of Probability and Statistics (1987 2006). Currently he on the editorial board of Annual Reviews of Statistics and its Applications. He has served on committees of Royal Statistical Society and of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics. He is an elected Fellow of the American Statistical Assocation and of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, an elected member of the International Statistical Institute, and a Chartered Statistician. In 2009 he was awarded a laurea honoris causa in Statistical Science by the University of Padova, in 2011 he held a Francqui Chair at Hasselt University, and in 2012 he was Mitchell Lecturer at the University of Glasgow. In 2015 he received the Guy Medal in Silver of the Royal Statistical Society and in 2018 was a Medallion Lecturer of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics.
