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"
Wulfram GerstnerWulfram Gerstner is Director of the Laboratory of Computational Neuroscience LCN at the EPFL. His research in computational neuroscience concentrates on models of spiking neurons and spike-timing dependent plasticity, on the problem of neuronal coding in single neurons and populations, as well as on the link between biologically plausible learning rules and behavioral manifestations of learning. He teaches courses for Physicists, Computer Scientists, Mathematicians, and Life Scientists at the EPFL. After studies of Physics in Tübingen and at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich (Master 1989), Wulfram Gerstner spent a year as a visiting researcher in Berkeley. He received his PhD in theoretical physics from the Technical University Munich in 1993 with a thesis on associative memory and dynamics in networks of spiking neurons. After short postdoctoral stays at Brandeis University and the Technical University of Munich, he joined the EPFL in 1996 as assistant professor. Promoted to Associate Professor with tenure in February 2001, he is since August 2006 a full professor with double appointment in the School of Computer and Communication Sciences and the School of Life Sciences. Wulfram Gerstner has been invited speaker at numerous international conferences and workshops. He has served on the editorial board of the Journal of Neuroscience, Network: Computation in Neural Systems', Journal of Computational Neuroscience', and `Science'.
Hannes BleulerSwiss, Born 19.2.1954
1973-78 ETH Zurich, M.S. in Electrical Engineering
1979-84 Teaching Assistant, Doctorate Student at ETH (Inst. of Mechanics)
1984 Ph.D. thesis in Mechatronics (magnetic bearings, Prof. G. Schweitzer)
1985-87 Research Engineer at Hitachi Ltd, Japan, Mechanical Engineering Research Laboratory;
1987 Invited researcher at the Tokyo Institute of Technology (Precision Mechatronics, Prof. K. Ono)
1988-91 Lecturer and Senior Assistant at ETH ; co-foundation of MECOS-Traxler AG
1991-95 Toshiba Chair of "Intelligent Mechatronics" and then regular Associate Professor at The University of Tokyo (Institute of Industrial Science)
1995-present Full Professor at EPFL Lausanne on microrobotics, biomedical robotics;
2000 Co-founder of xitact SA, Morges (robotic surgery instrumentation & simulators)
2002-2006 President Conference of Professors and Lecturers of EPFL, member of Assemblée de l'Ecole
2006 Chairman of ISMB10 (10th International Symposium on Magnetic Bearings, Martigny, Switzerland)
2006 Nomination as member of the Swiss Academy of Technical Sciences (SATW)
Juan Pablo Zuluaga GomezJuan Pablo Zuluaga is currently working at IDIAP as a joint Ph.D. student (second year) with the École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland. He is currently working on the EU Horizon 2020 ATCO2 project, dedicated to the development of an Automatic Air Traffic Speech Recognition system, allowing to collect, organize and pre-process air traffic control (voice communication) data from air space. His main interests are automatic speech recognition and speech understanding. Also interested in artificial general intelligence and natural language processing.
