Ali H. SayedAli H. Sayed est doyen de la Faculté des sciences et techniques de l’ingénieur (STI) de l'EPFL, en Suisse, où il dirige également le laboratoire de systèmes adaptatifs. Il a également été professeur émérite et président du département d'ingénierie électrique de l'UCLA. Il est reconnu comme un chercheur hautement cité et est membre de la US National Academy of Engineering. Il est également membre de l'Académie mondiale des sciences et a été président de l'IEEE Signal Processing Society en 2018 et 2019.
Le professeur Sayed est auteur et co-auteur de plus de 570 publications et de six monographies. Ses recherches portent sur plusieurs domaines, dont les théories d'adaptation et d'apprentissage, les sciences des données et des réseaux, l'inférence statistique et les systèmes multi-agents, entre autres.
Ses travaux ont été récompensés par plusieurs prix importants, notamment le prix Fourier de l'IEEE (2022), le prix de la société Norbert Wiener (2020) et le prix de l'éducation (2015) de la société de traitement des signaux de l'IEEE, le prix Papoulis (2014) de l'Association européenne de traitement des signaux, le Meritorious Service Award (2013) et le prix de la réalisation technique (2012) de la société de traitement des signaux de l'IEEE, le prix Terman (2005) de la société américaine de formation des ingénieurs, le prix de conférencier émérite (2005) de la société de traitement des signaux de l'IEEE, le prix Koweït (2003) et le prix Donald G. Fink (1996) de l'IEEE. Ses publications ont été récompensées par plusieurs prix du meilleur article de l'IEEE (2002, 2005, 2012, 2014) et de l'EURASIP (2015). Pour finir, Ali H. Sayed est aussi membre de l'IEEE, d'EURASIP et de l'American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), l'éditeur de la revue Science.
Jean-Philippe ThiranJean-Philippe Thiran was born in Namur, Belgium, in August 1970. He received the Electrical Engineering degree and the PhD degree from the Université catholique de Louvain (UCL), Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium, in 1993 and 1997, respectively. From 1993 to 1997, he was the co-ordinator of the medical image analysis group of the Communications and Remote Sensing Laboratory at UCL, mainly working on medical image analysis. Dr Jean-Philippe Thiran joined the Signal Processing Institute (ITS) of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL), Lausanne, Switzerland, in February 1998 as a senior lecturer. He was promoted to Assistant Professor in 2004, to Associate Professor in 2011 and is now a Full Professor since 2020. He also holds a 20% position at the Department of Radiology of the University of Lausanne (UNIL) and of the Lausanne University Hospital (CHUV) as Associate Professor ad personam. Dr Thiran's current scientific interests include
Computational medical imaging: acquisition, reconstruction and analysis of imaging data, with emphasis on regularized linear inverse problems (compressed sensing, convex optimization). Applications to medical imaging: diffusion MRI, ultrasound imaging, inverse planning in radiotherapy, etc.Computer vision & machine learning: image and video analysis, with application to facial expression recognition, eye tracking, lip reading, industrial inspection, medical image analysis, etc.
Pierre VandergheynstPierre Vandergheynst received the M.S. degree in physics and the Ph.D. degree in mathematical physics from the Université catholique de Louvain, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium, in 1995 and 1998, respectively. From 1998 to 2001, he was a Postdoctoral Researcher with the Signal Processing Laboratory, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL), Lausanne, Switzerland. He was Assistant Professor at EPFL (2002-2007), where he is now a Full Professor of Electrical Engineering and, by courtesy, of Computer and Communication Sciences. As of 2015, Prof. Vandergheynst serves as EPFL’s Vice-Provost for Education. His research focuses on harmonic analysis, sparse approximations and mathematical data processing in general with applications covering signal, image and high dimensional data processing, computer vision, machine learning, data science and graph-based data processing. He was co-Editor-in-Chief of Signal Processing (2002-2006), Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing (2007-2011), the flagship journal of the signal processing community and currently serves as Associate Editor of Computer Vision and Image Understanding and SIAM Imaging Sciences. He has been on the Technical Committee of various conferences, serves on the steering committee of the SPARS workshop and was co-General Chairman of the EUSIPCO 2008 conference. Pierre Vandergheynst is the author or co-author of more than 70 journal papers, one monograph and several book chapters. He has received two IEEE best paper awards. Professor Vandergheynst is a laureate of the Apple 2007 ARTS award and of the 2009-2010 De Boelpaepe prize of the Royal Academy of Sciences of Belgium.
Sabine SüsstrunkProf. Dr. Sabine Süsstrunk leads the Image and Visual Representation Lab in the School of Computer and Communication Sciences (IC) at EPFL since 1999. From 2015-2020, she was also the first Director of the Digital Humanities Institute (DHI), College of Humanities (CdH). Her main research areas are in computational photography, computational imaging, color image processing and computer vision, machine learning, and computational image quality and aesthetics. Sabine has authored and co-authored over 200 publications, of which 7 have received best paper/demo awards, and holds over 10 patents. Sabine served as chair and/or committee member in many international conferences on image processing, computer vision, and image systems engineering. She is President of the Swiss Science Council SSC, Founding Member and Member of the Board (President 2014-2018) of the EPFL-WISH (Women in Science and Humanities) Foundation, Member of the Board of the SRG SSR (Swiss Radio and Television Corporation), and Member of the Board of Largo Films. She received the IS&T/SPIE 2013 Electronic Imaging Scientist of the Year Award for her contributions to color imaging, computational photography, and image quality, and the 2018 IS&T Raymond C. Bowman and the 2020 EPFL AGEPoly IC Polysphere Awards for excellence in teaching. Sabine is a Fellow of IEEE and IS&T.
André-Gilles DumontAndré-Gilles Dumont est né en 1951 à la Brévine (NE). Il obtient en 1976 le diplôme d'ingénieur civil de l'EPFL.
Jusqu'en 1979, il est collaborateur d'un bureau d'ingénieurs et dirige la construction de divers bâtiments. Il entre ensuite au Laboratoire des voies de circulation (LAVOC) où il va développer une méthodologie d'essais en vraie grandeur des superstructures routières. Cette activité sera poursuivie au niveau international au sein de deux groupes d'experts scientifiques de l'OCDE.
Parallèlement au développement du LAVOC et à l'exécution de nombreux mandats pour des tiers, il est l'auteur de plusieurs recherches dans le domaine des matériaux granulaires et des bitumineux modifiés par des polymères.
En Suisse, il assume dès 1985 la présidence de la commission Technologie des matériaux de l'Union des professionnels suisses de la route puis, dès 1990, celle de la commission de coordination Exécution et entretien.
Depuis 1991, il est professeur et dirige le LAVOC. Il enseigne aux étudiants du génie civil et du génie rural, d'une part le tracé des voies de circulation et, d'autre part la construction et l'entretien des superstructures routières. Il mène également des recherches dans le domaine des propriétés des matériaux hydrocarbonés et de la modélisation des chaussées, comme dans celui de l'utilisation de la CAO pour l'élaboration des projets routiers et la prise en compte des facteurs environnementaux.
Nikolaos GeroliminisProf. Nikolas Geroliminis is an Associate Professor at EPFL and the head of the Urban Transport Systems Laboratory (LUTS). Before joining EPFL he was an Assistant Professor on the faculty of the Department of Civil Engineering at the University of Minnesota. He has a diploma in Civil Engineering from the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA) and a MSc and Ph.D. in civil engineering from University of California, Berkeley. He is an Associate Editor for Transportation Research part C and he also serves in the editorial board of TR, part B, Transportation Letters, Journal of ITS and of many international conferences. He is a member of the Transportation Research Board's Traffic Flow Theory Committee. His research interests focus primarily on urban transportation systems, traffic flow theory and control, public transportation and logistics, Optimization and Large Scale Networks. He is a recent recipient of the ERC Starting Grant METAFERW: Modeling and controlling traffic congestion and propagation in large-scale urban multimodal networks
Education
Diploma, 2003, Civil Engineering, National Technical University of Athens, Greece
M.S., 2004, Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of California at Berkeley
Ph.D., 2007, Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of California at Berkeley
Volker GassAfter completing his master’s degree in Microtechnology at the Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne in 1989 he worked as a Project Manager at Mecanex SA, a Swiss High-Tech company active in the field of Aerospace Mechanisms. While working at Mecanex he completed a PhD in Science in the field of applied Micro-Systems Technologies at the University of Neuchâtel, Switzerland in 1994. In 1995, Volker Gass participated in the Management Buy Out of Mecanex SA. In 2000, Mecanex was acquired by the Swiss Defence and Technology group RUAG . He was appointed to lead Customer Relations and Business Development of the newly formed Systems & Space Division at RUAG Aerospace in 2004. In the same year he was appointed member of the Swiss Academy of Engineering Sciences for his contribution in the field of High-Technology Space applications. From November 2006 to June 2007, Volker Gass successfully graduated RUAG’s Top Leadership Course, and held the position of General Manager, Sales & Marketing in the Space Division of RUAG in Switzerland as well as Member of the Board of Directors (President) of Mecanex USA Inc., Berlin, CT, until December 2009.In 2008 he successfully led the acquisition of SAAB Space and its subsidiary Austrian Aerospace. From January to June 2009 Volker Gass led the business team in the successful acquisition of Oerlikon Space. From mid-2009 to September 2011 he was responsible for Special Projects in the Marketing & Sales Organization of RUAG Space Switzerland. Since October 2011, Dr. Volker Gass is nominated Director of the Swiss Space Center at the Ecole Politechnique Fédérale de Lausanne. In March 2012, he is awarded the title of Adjunct Professor at the School of Engineering (STI) of the EPFL. From January 2014 to December 2017, he was nominated member of ESA’s Human Spaceflight and Exploration Science Advisory Committee (HESAC) and from spring 2015 to December 2018, observer at ESA’s Earth Science Advisory Committee (ESAC).As of January 1, 2021, The Swiss Space Center is renamed "Space Innovation"
Devis TuiaI come from Ticino and studied in Lausanne, between UNIL and EPFL. After my PhD at UNIL in remote sensing, I was postdoc in Valencia (Spain), Boulder (CO) and EPFL, working on model adaptation and prior knowledge integration in machine learning. In 2014 I became Research Assistant Professor at University of Zurich, where I started the 'multimodal remote sensing' group. In 2017, I joined Wageningen University (NL), where I was professor of the GeoInformation Science and Remote Sensing Laboratory. Since 2020, I joined EPFL Valais, to start the ECEO lab, working at the interface between Earth observation, machine learning and environmental sciences.
Ian SmithPhD Université de Cambridge, 1982 Interêts 1 Contrôle actif de la forme des structures pour améliorer leur aptitude au service et leur déploiement 2 Structures biomimétiques (apprentissage, auto-diagnostic, auto-réparation) 3 Gestion de l'infrastructure par l'identification structurale 4 Applications avancées de l'informatique Plus de détails, voir https://www.epfl.ch/labs/imac/fr/recherche/smith_ian_fr/ Paolo De Los RiosPaolo De Los Rios earned his master in Electronic Engineering at the Turin Institute of Technology (Politecnico di Torino) in May 1993. In November 1993 he moved to Trieste, Italy, to enter the PhD program in Theoretical Condensed Matter Theory at the International School for Advanced Studies (SISSA/ISAS) where he obtained the PhD degree in October 1996 for his work on the statistical physics of disordered systems. After a one year postdoc at the Max-Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems in Dresden, Germany, in November 1997 he moved to the University of Fribourg, Switzerland, to join the group of Prof. Yi-Cheng Zhang. There he has worked on various applications of statistical physics to complex systems. In September 2000 he has been appointed Assistant Professor in Statistical Physics of Living Matter and Complex Systems at the Institute of Theoretical Physics of the University of Lausanne, Switzerland. Since April 2010 he is Associate Professor at the Institute of Theoretical Physics of the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland.
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.
