Robert WestRobert West is a tenure-track assistant professor of computer science at EPFL, where he heads the Data Science Lab. In his research, he develops and applies techniques in machine learning, computational social science, natural language processing, social network analysis, and data mining. Bob also collaborates closely with the Wikimedia Foundation, in his role as a Wikimedia Research Fellow. Bob’s work has won several awards, including best/outstanding paper awards at ICWSM’21, ICWSM’19, and WWW’13, a best-paper runner-up award at WWW’16, a Google Faculty Research Award, a Facebook Research Award, a Hewlett-Packard Graduate Fellowship, and a Facebook Graduate Fellowship. He is actively involved in the research community, e.g., as an Associate Editor of ICWSM and EPJ Data Science and as a co-founder of the Wiki Workshop (held at WWW and ICWSM) and the Applied Machine Learning Days. Bob received his PhD in Computer Science from Stanford University, his MSc from McGill University, Canada, and his undergraduate degree from Technische Universität München, Germany.[Last updated: 25 Aug 2021]
Marilyne AndersenMarilyne Andersen is a Full Professor of Sustainable Construction Technologies and heads the Laboratory of Integrated Performance in Design (LIPID) that she launched in the Fall of 2010. She was Dean of the School of Architecture, Civil and Environmental Engineering (ENAC) at EPFL from 2013 to 2018 and is the Academic Director of the Smart Living Lab in Fribourg. She also co-leads the Student Kreativity and Innovation Laboratory (SKIL) at ENAC. Before joining EPFL as a faculty, she was an Assistant Professor then Associate Professor tenure-track in the Building Technology Group of the MIT School of Architecture and Planning and the Head of the MIT Daylighting Lab that she founded in 2004. She has also been Invited Professor at the Singapore University of Technology and Design in 2019. Marilyne Andersen owns a Master of Science in Physics and specialized in daylighting through her PhD in Building Physics at EPFL in the Solar Energy and Building Physics Laboratory (LESO) and as a Visiting Scholar in the Building Technologies Department of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California. Her research lies at the interface between science, engineering and architectural design with a dedicated emphasis on the impact of daylight on building occupants. Focused on questions of comfort, perception and health and their implications on energy considerations, these research efforts aim towards a deeper integration of the design process with daylighting performance and indoor comfort, by reaching out to various fields of science, from chronobiology and neuroscience to psychophysics and computer graphics. She is leveraging this research in practice through OCULIGHT dynamics, a startup company she co-founded, which offers specialized consulting services on daylight performance and its psycho-physiological effects on building occupants. She is the author of more than 200 papers published in peer-reviewed journals and international conferences and the recipient of several grants and awards including: the Daylight Award for Research (2016), eleven publication awards and distinctions (2009, 2011, 2012, 2015, 2018, 2019) including the Taylor Technical Talent Award 2009 granted by the Illuminating Engineering Society, the 3M Non-Tenured Faculty Grant (2009), the Mitsui Career Development Professorship at MIT (2008) and the EPFL prize of the Chorafas Foundation awarded to her PhD thesis in Sustainability (2005). Her research or teaching has been supported by professional, institutional and industrial organizations such as: the Swiss and the U.S. National Science Foundations, the Velux Foundation, the European Horizon 2020 program, the Boston Society of Architects, the MIT Energy Initiative and InnoSuisse. She was the leader and faculty advisor of the Swiss Team and its NeighborHub project, who won the U.S. Solar Decathlon 2017 competition with 8 podiums out of 10 contests. She is a member of the Board of the LafargeHolcim Foundation for Sustainable Construction and Head of its Academic Committee. She is also a member of the Editorial Board of the journal Building and Environment by Elsevier, and of the journals LEUKOS (of the Illuminating Engineering Society) and Buildings and Cities, by Taylor and Francis. She is expert to the Innovation Council of InnoSuisse and Founding member as well as Board member of the Foundation Culture du Bâti (CUB), and is also founding member of the Daylight Academy and an active member of several committees of the Illuminating Engineering Society (IES) and International Commission on Illumination (CIE).
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.
François AvellanProf. François Avellan, director of the EPFL Laboratory for Hydraulic Machines, graduated in Hydraulic Engineering from Ecole nationale supérieure d'hydraulique, Institut national polytechnique de Grenoble, France, in 1977 and, in 1980, got his doctoral degree in engineering from University of Aix-Marseille II, France. Research associate at EPFL in 1980, he is director of the EPFL Laboratory for Hydraulic Machines since 1994 and, in 2003, was appointed Ordinary Professor in Hydraulic Machinery. Supervising 37 EPFL doctoral theses, he was distinguished by SHF, Société hydrotechnique de France, awarding him the "Grand Prix 2010 de l'hydrotechnique". His main research domains of interests are hydrodynamics of turbine, pump and pump-turbines including cavitation, hydro-acoustics, design, performance and operation assessments of hydraulic machines. Prof. Avellan was Chairman of the IAHR Section on Hydraulic Machinery and Systems from 2002 to 2012. He has conducted successfully several Swiss and international collaborative research projects, involving key hydropower operators and suppliers, such as:
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Coordination for the FP7 European project n° 608532 "HYPERBOLE: HYdropower plants PERformance and flexiBle Operation towards Lean integration of new renewable Energies" (2013-2017);
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Deputy Head of the Swiss Competence Center for Energy Research – Supply of Electricity (SCCER-SoE) to carry out innovative and sustainable research in the areas of geo-energy and hydropower for phase I (2013-2016) and Phase II (2017, 2010) to be approved.
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EUREKA European research projects: N° 4150 and N° 3246, "HYDRODYNA, Harnessing the dynamic behavior of pump-turbines", (2003-2011), N° 1605, "FLINDT, Flow Investigation in Draft Tubes", http://flindt.epfl.ch/, (1997-2002). N° 2418, "SCAPIN, Stability of Operation of Francis turbines, prediction and modeling";
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Swiss KTI/CTI research projects with GE Renewable Energy (anc. ALSTOM Hydro), Birr, ANDRITZ Hydro, Kriens, FMV, Sion, Groupe E, Granges-Paccot, Power Vision engineering, Ecublens and SULZER Pumps, Winterthur.
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ETH Domain, HYDRONET Project for the Competence Center Energy and Mobility, PSI Villingen.
Furthermore, he is involved in scientific expertise and independent contractual experimental validations of turbines and pump turbines performances for the main hydropower plants in the world. In recognition for his work as Convenor of the TC4 working group of experts in editing the IEC 60193 standard he received the "IEC 1906 Award" from the International Electrotechnical Commission. 