Farhad Rachidi-HaeriFarhad Rachidi (IEEE Fellow, EMP Fellow, Electromagnetics Academy Fellow) was born in Geneva in 1962. He received the M.S. degree in electrical engineering and the Ph.D. degree from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Lausanne, in 1986 and 1991 respectively.
He worked at the Power Systems Laboratory of the same institute until 1996 and had several short stays at the University of Florida and the NASA Kennedy Space Center. In 1997, he joined the Lightning Research Laboratory of the University of Toronto in Canada and from April 1998 until September 1999, he was with Montena EMC in Switzerland. He is currently a titular professor and the head of the EMC Laboratory at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Lausanne, Switzerland.
His research interests concern electromagnetic compatibility, lightning electromagnetics and electromagnetic field interactions with transmission lines.
Dr. Rachidi is currently a member of the Advisory Board of the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON ELECTROMAGNETIC COMPATIBILITY and the President of the Swiss National Committee of the International Union of Radio Science.
He has received numerous awards including the 2005 IEEE EMC Technical Achievement Award, the 2005 CIGRE Technical Committee Award, the 2006 Blondel Medal from the French Association of Electrical Engineering, Electronics, Information Technology and Communication (SEE), the 2016 Berger Award from the International Conference on Lightning Protection, the 2016 Best Paper Award of the IEEE Transactions on EMC, and the 2017 Motohisa Kanda Award for the most cited paper of the IEEE Transactions on EMC (2012-2016).
In 2014, he was conferred the title of Honorary Professor of the Xi’an Jiaotong University in China.
He served as the Vice-Chair of the European COST Action on the Physics of Lightning Flash and its Effects from 2005 to 2009, the Chairman of the 2008 European Electromagnetics International Symposium, the President of the International Conference on Lightning Protection from 2008 to 2014, the Editor-in-Chief of the Open Atmospheric Science Journal (2010-2012) and the Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON ELECTROMAGNETIC COMPATIBILITY from 2013 to 2015. He is a Fellow of the IEEE and of the SUMMA Foundation, and a member of the Swiss Academy of Sciences.
He is the author or coauthor of over 200 scientific papers published in peer-reviewed journals and over 400 papers presented at international conferences.
Denis GilletDenis Gillet received the Diploma in Electrical Engineering from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL) in 1988, and the Ph.D. degree in Information Systems also from the EPFL in 1995. During 1992 he was appointed as Research Fellow at the Information Systems Laboratory of Stanford University in the United States. He is currently Maître d'enseignement et de recherche at the EPFL School of Engineering, where he leads the React research group. His current research interests include Technologies Enhanced Learning (TEL), Human Computer Interaction (HCI), Human Devices Interaction (HDI) and Optimal Coordination of Complex and Distributed Systems. Denis Gillet is affiliated at EPFL with the Center for Intelligent Systems and the Center for Digital Education.
Jamie PaikProf. Jamie Paik is founder and director of the Reconfigurable Robotics Lab (RRL) of Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL) and a core member of Swiss NCCR robotics group. The RRL leverages expertise in multi-material fabrication and smart material actuation for novel robot designs. She received her PhD in Seoul National University on designing humanoid arm and a hand while being sponsored by Samsung Electronics. This 7-DoF humanoid arm was the lightest in the literature at that time being 3.7kg including the 8-DoF hand. During her Postdoctoral positions in the Institut des Systems Intelligents et de Robotic in Universitat Pierre Marie Curie, Paris VI, she developed laparoscopic tools named JAiMY that are internationally patented and commercialized now by Endocontrol-medical.com. At Harvard University’s Microrobotics Laboratory, she started developing unconventional robots that push the physical limits of material and mechanisms. Her latest research effort is in soft robotics including self-morphing Robogami (robotic origami) that transforms its planar shape to 2D or 3D by folding in predefined patterns and sequences, just like the paper art, origami.
Daniel ThalmannProf. Daniel Thalmann is Honorary Professor at EPFL and Director of Research development at MIRALab Sarl. He has been Visiting Professor at The Institute for Media Innovation (Nanyang Technological University, Singapore) from 2009 to 2017. He is a pioneer in research on Virtual Humans. His current research interests include Real-time Virtual Humans in Virtual Reality, crowd simulation, and 3D Interaction. Daniel Thalmann has been the Founder of The Virtual Reality Lab (VRlab) at EPFL, Switzerland, Professor at The University of Montreal and Visiting Professor/ Researcher at CERN, University of Nebraska, University of Tokyo, and National University of Singapore. Until October 2010, he was the President of the Swiss Association of Research in Information Technology and one Director of the European Research Consortium in Informatics and Mathematics (ERCIM). He is coeditor-in-chief of the Journal of Computer Animation and Virtual Worlds, and member of the editorial board of 6 other journals. Daniel Thalmann was member of numerous Program Committees, Program Chair and CoChair of several conferences including IEEE VR, ACM VRST, and ACM VRCAI. Daniel Thalmann has published more than 500 papers in Graphics, Animation, and Virtual Reality. He is coeditor of 30 books, and coauthor of several books including 'Crowd Simulation' (second edition 2012) and 'Stepping Into Virtual Reality' (2007), published by Springer. He received his PhD in Computer Science in 1977 from the University of Geneva and an Honorary Doctorate (Honoris Causa) from University Paul- Sabatier in Toulouse, France, in 2003. He also received the Eurographics Distinguished Career Award in 2010 and the 2012 Canadian Human Computer Communications Society Achievement Award. Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Thalmann Maryam KamgarpourMaryam Kamgarpour holds a Doctor of Philosophy in Engineering from the University of California, Berkeley and a Bachelor of Applied Science from University of Waterloo, Canada. Her research is on safe decision-making and control under uncertainty, game theory and mechanism design, mixed integer and stochastic optimization and control. Her theoretical research is motivated by control challenges arising in intelligent transportation networks, robotics, power grid systems and healthcare. She is the recipient of NASA High Potential Individual Award, NASA Excellence in Publication Award, and the European Union (ERC) Starting Grant.
Mohamed BouriDr. Mohamed Bouri is a group leader of Rehabilitation and Assistive Robotics in LSRO and lecturer of Robotics and Industrial Robotics. He graduated in Electrical Engineering in 1992 and obtained his PhD degree in 1997 in Industrial Automation at INSA LYON, France. Since 1997, he is at EPFL and is mainly active in the field of robot control, automation and robot design for medical and industrial applications. He is the head of Rehabilitation and Assistive Robotics group since 2005 and has strong references with the development of robotic devices for lower limb rehabilitation : The MotionMaker and WalkTrainer commercialzed by the company Swortec. His ongoing research currently focuses on the development of exoskeletons and the associated control strategies. His main current projects are TWIICE, a lower limb exoskeleton for people with paraplegia, AUTONOMYO, a walk assistance exoskeleton for people with muscle weakness, and the HiBSO, a hip orthosis for elderly.
John Richard ThomeJohn R. Thome is Professor of Heat and Mass Transfer at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland since 1998, where his primary interests of research are two-phase flow and heat transfer, covering both macro-scale and micro-scale heat transfer and enhanced heat transfer. He directs the Laboratory of Heat and Mass Transfer (LTCM) at the EPFL with a research staff of about 18-20 and is also Director of the Doctoral School in Energy. He received his Ph.D. at Oxford University, England in 1978. He is the author of four books: Enhanced Boiling Heat Transfer (1990), Convective Boiling and Condensation, 3rd Edition (1994), Wolverine Engineering Databook III (2004) and Nucleate Boiling on Micro-Structured Surfaces (2008). He received the ASME Heat Transfer Division's Best Paper Award in 1998 for a 3-part paper on two-phase flow and flow boiling heat transfer published in the Journal of Heat Transfer. He has received the J&E Hall Gold Medal from the U.K. Institute of Refrigeration in February, 2008 for his extensive research contributions on refrigeration heat transfer and more recently the 2010 ASME Heat Transfer Memorial Award. He has published widely on the fundamental aspects of microscale and macroscale two-phase flow and heat transfer and on enhanced boiling and condensation heat transfer.
