Jean-François MolinariProfessor J.F. Molinari is the director of the Computational Solid Mechanics Laboratory (http://lsms.epfl.ch) at EPFL, Switzerland. He holds an appointment in the Civil Engineering institute, which he directed from 2013 to 2017, and a joint appointment in the Materials Science institute. He started his tenure at EPFL in 2007, and was promoted to Full Professor in 2012. He is currently an elected member of the Research Council of the Swiss National Science Foundation in Division 2 (Mathematics, Natural and Engineering Sciences), and co editor in chief of the journal Mechanics of Materials. J.F. Molinari graduated from Caltech, USA, in 2001, with a M.S. and Ph.D. in Aeronautics. He held professorships in several countries besides Switzerland, including the United States with a position in Mechanical Engineering at the Johns Hopkins University (2000-2006), and France at Ecole Normale Supérieure Cachan in Mechanics (2005-2007), as well as a Teaching Associate position at the Ecole Polytechnique de Paris (2006-2009). The work conducted by Prof. Molinari and his collaborators takes place at the frontier between traditional disciplines and covers several length scales from atomistic to macroscopic scales. Over the years, Professor Molinari and his group have been developing novel multiscale approaches for a seamless coupling across scales. The activities of the laboratory span the domains of damage mechanics of materials and structures, nano- and microstructural mechanical properties, and tribology. Reymond ClavelReymond CLAVEL obtained his degree in mechanical engineering at the Federal Institute of Technology of Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland, in 1973. After nine years of gathered experience in industrial plants at Hermes Precisa International (research and development), he was appointed professor at the EPFL, where he obtained his PhD degree in parallel robotics in 1991. He was then consecutively entrusted with the following positions: Head of the department, Director of the Section of micro engineering and, in 1993, Director of the Laboratory of robotics systems (LSRO). His present research topics are parallel robotics, high speed and high precision robotics, medical and surgical robotics applications, surgical instrumentation and precision mechanisms.
Reymond Clavels research successes in parallel and industrial robotics received worldwide special mentions.
Awards :
1989: Laureate of the JIRA AWARD (Japan Industrial Robot Association) for the DELTA parallel robot invented in 1985.
1996: Project winner of the Technologiestandort Schweiz competition and ABB Sonderpreis for the best robotics project.
1998: His laboratory is awarded the Grand Prix de lInnovation in Monaco for new robot technologies.
1999: Laureate of the Golden Robot Award for the DELTA Robot.
2003: Each of his three different submitted projects received the Swiss Technology Award.
2005: Project winner of the Swiss Technology Award competition with further the Sonderpreis 2005 from the Vontobel Foundation in the field of Inventing the future.
2006: Project winner of the Swiss Technology Award competition with Quantum leap into world of nano-EDM (a new high precision EDM machine based on the Delta kinematics).
2007: Two projects based on the LSROs researches are winner of the Swiss Technology Award competition: Cyberthosis for paraplegia rehabilitation (a collaboration with the company Swortec and the Fondation Suisse pour les Cyberthèses (FSC)) and the Microfactory realized in partnership with the CSEM .
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.
Giorgio MargaritondoCitizen of the USA and Switzerland, Giorgio Margaritondo was born in Rome, Italy, in 1946. He received the Laurea summa cum laude from the University of Rome in 1969. From 1969 he was an employee of the Italian National Research Council in Rome and Frascati and, in 1975-77, he was at Bell Laboratories in the USA. From 1978 to 1990, he was professor of physics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the USA; in 1984 he was nominated associate director for research of the Synchrotron Radiation Center of the same university. In 1990 he was nominated "professeur ordinaire" (full professor) at the EPFL; he directed the Institute of Applied Physics and the Physics Department. He was also a honorary faculty member at Vanderbilt University in Nashville. In 2001 he became Dean of the EPFL Faculty of Basic Sciences. In 2004 he was nominated Provost and he served until 2010, when he became Dean of Continuing Education, until his retirement from the EPFL in 2016 In addition to teaching general physics, his activity concerns the physics of semiconductors and superconductors (electronic states, surfaces and interfaces) and of biological systems; his main experimental techniques are electron spectroscopy and spectromicroscopy, x-ray imaging and scanning near-field microscopy, including experiments with synchrotron light and with free electron lasers. Author of more than 700 scientific publications and 9 books, he was also coordinator in 1995-98 of the scientific division of the Elettra synchrotron in Trieste. In 1997-2003 he was coordinator of the European Commission Round Table on synchrotron radiation, and then became president of the Council of the European Commission Integrated Initiative on Synchrotron and Free Electron Laser Science (IA-SFS and then ELISA), the largest network in the world in this domain. In 2011-15, he was Editor-in-Chief of Journal of Physics D (Applied Physics). He is currently vice-president of the council of the Università della Svizzera Italiana (USI), and president of the Scientific and Technological Committee of the Italian Institute of Technology (IIT). He is Fellow of the American Physical Society and of the American Vacuum Society and Fellow and Chartered Physicist of the Institute of Physics.
Roger HerschRoger D. Hersch is professor of Computer Science and head of the Peripheral Systems Laboratory at EPFL. He received his engineering degree from ETHZ in 1975, worked in industry from 1975 to 1980, and obtained his PhD degree from EPFL in 1985. He directed the widely known
Visible Human Web Server project
, which offers a number of services for the visualization of human anatomy.
His current research focuses on color reproduction, spectral color prediction models, moiré imaging, and visual document security. Recent achievements include the PhotoProtect technology, which incorporates text as chromatic differences in order to protect identity photographs (Swiss driving license), microstructure imaging, which is used by railways companies (SNCF, RENFE) and festival organizers (Paleo) to print tickets at home and the band moire imaging technology for the protection of security documents.
Martin RajmanMartin Rajman is the Executive Director of
Nano-tera.ch
, a large Swiss Research Program funding collaborative multi-disciplinary projects for the engineering of complex systems in Health and the Environment. Since 2008, the Nano-Tera.ch program started more than 100 research projects for a total public funding of more than 95 Mo CHF (~100 Mo USD).
Before being appointed as Nano-Tera.ch Executive Director, Martin Rajman was Director of the EPFL Global Computing Center (CGC), an association of research groups and laboratories of the School of Computer and Communication Sciences fostering interdisciplinary research in the general area of internet computing and distributed information systems. In this position, he was managing more than 20 European projects.
In parallel with his research management activities, Martin Rajman is senior researcher at EPF Lausanne, Switzerland (EPFL). His research interests include Artificial Intelligence, Computational Linguistics and Data-driven Probabilistic Machine Learning.
Previously, he was senior researcher at the Computer Science Department of Telecom Paris-Tech, where he was in charge of the development of a research and teaching activity in the domain of Natural Language Processing.
Martin Rajman is also active in various large scale industry-research collaborations with majors economic players. In particular, he has been involved in the improvement of the product ranking technology used by e-Bay and is currently collaborating with Elsevier on enhanced article recommendation techniques.
Martin Rajman is author or co-author of more than 100 publications and former Director of the Computer Science Series of EPFL-Press (PPUR).
