Dario FloreanoProf. Dario Floreano is director of the Laboratory of Intelligent Systems at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL). Since 2010, he is the founding director of the Swiss National Center of Competence in Robotics, a research program that brings together more than 20 labs across Switzerland. Prof. Floreano holds an M.A. in Vision, an M.S. in Neural Computation, and a PhD in Robotics. He has held research positions at Sony Computer Science Laboratory, at Caltech/JPL, and at Harvard University. His main research interests are Robotics and A.I. at the convergence of biology and engineering. Prof. Floreano made pioneering contributions to the fields of evolutionary robotics, aerial robotics, and soft robotics. He served in numerous advisory boards and committees, including the Future and Emerging Technologies division of the European Commission, the World Economic Forum Agenda Council, the International Society of Artificial Life, the International Neural Network Society, and in the editorial committee of several scientific journals. In addition, he helped spinning off two drone companies (senseFly.com and Flyability.com) and a non-for-profit portal on robotics and A.I. (RoboHub.org). Books
Manuale sulle Reti Neurali, il Mulino (in Italian), 1996 (first edition), 2006 (second edition)Evolutionary Robotics, MIT Press, 2000
Bio-Inspired Artificial Intelligence, MIT Press, 2008
Flying Insects and Robots, Springer Verlag, 2010
Francesco MondadaDr. Mondada received his M.Sc. in micro-engineering in 1991 and his Doctoral degree in 1997 at EPFL. During his thesis he co-founded the company K-Team, being both CEO and president of the company for about 5 years. He is one of the three main developers of the Khepera robot, considered as a standard in bio-inspired robotics and used by more than 1,000 universities and research centers worldwide. Fully back in research in 2000 and after a short period at CALTECH, he participated to the SWARM-BOTS project as the main developer of the s-bot robot platform, which was ranked on position 39 in the list of The 50 Best Robots Ever (fiction or real) by the Wired Journal in 2006. The SWARM-BOTS project was selected as FET-IST success story by the EU commission. He is author of more than 100 papers in the field of bio-inspired robotics and system level robot design. He is co-editor of several international conference proceedings. In November 2005 he received the EPFL Latsis University prize for his contributions to bio-inspired robotics. In 2011 he received the "Crédit Suisse Award for Best Teaching" from EPFL and in 2012 the "polysphère" award from the students as best teacher in the school of engineering. His interests include the development of innovative mechatronic solutions for mobile and modular robots, the creation of know-how for future embedded applications, and making robot platforms more accessible for education, research, and industrial development.
Alcherio MartinoliI received my Diploma in Electrical Engineering from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETHZ), and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL). I am currently an Associate Professor at the School of Architecture, Civil, and Environmental Engineering and the head of the Distributed Intelligent Systems and Algorithms Laboratory. Before joining EPFL I carried out research activities at the Institute of Biomedical Engineering of the ETHZ, at the Institute of Industrial Automation of the Spanish Research Council in Madrid, Spain, and at the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, U.S.A. Additional information can be found on my full CV.
Auke IjspeertAuke Ijspeert is a full professor at the EPFL, and head of the Biorobotics Laboratory (BioRob). He has a B.Sc./M.Sc. in physics from the EPFL (1995), and a PhD in artificial intelligence from the University of Edinburgh (1999). He carried out postdocs at IDSIA and EPFL, and at the University of Southern California (USC). He then became a research assistant professor at USC, and an external collaborator at ATR (Advanced Telecommunications Research institute) in Japan. In 2002, he came back to the EPFL as an SNF assistant professor. He was promoted to associate professor in October 2009 and to full professor in April 2016. His primary affiliation is with the Institute of Bioengineering, and secondary affiliation with the Institute of Mechanical Engineering. His research interests are at the intersection between robotics, computational neuroscience, nonlinear dynamical systems, and machine learning. He is interested in using numerical simulations and robots to get a better understanding of sensorimotor coordination in animals, and in using inspiration from biology to design novel types of robots and adaptive controllers. (see for instance Ijspeert et al Science 2007, Ijspeert Science 2014, and Nyakatura et al Nature 2019). He is also investigating how to assist people with limited mobility using exoskeletons and assistive furniture. He is regularly invited to give talks on these topics (e.g. TED talk given at TED Global Geneva, Dec 8 2015). With his colleagues, he has received paper awards at ICRA2002, CLAWAR2005, IEEE Humanoids 2007, IEEE ROMAN 2014, CLAWAR 2015, SAB2018, and CLAWAR 2019. He is an IEEE Fellow, member of the Board of Reviewing Editors of Science magazine, and associate editor for the IEEE Transactions on Medical Robotics and Bionics and for the International Journal of Humanoid Robotics. He has acted as an associate editor for the IEEE Transactions on Robotics (2009-2013) and for Soft Robotics (2018-2021). He was a guest editor for the Proceedings of IEEE, IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering, Autonomous Robots, IEEE Robotics and Automation Magazine, and Biological Cybernetics. He has been the organizer of 7 international conferences (BioADIT2004, SAB2004, AMAM2005, BioADIT2006, LATSIS2006, SSRR2016, AMAM2019), and a program committee member of over 50 conferences.
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 Pierre DillenbourgA former teacher in elementary school, Pierre Dillenbourg graduated in educational science (University of Mons, Belgium). He started his research on learning technologies in 1984. In 1986, he has been on of the first in the world to apply machine learning to develop a self-improving teaching system. He obtained a PhD in computer science from the University of Lancaster (UK), in the domain of artificial intelligence applications for education. He has been assistant professor at the University of Geneva. He joined EPFL in 2002. He has been the director of Center for Research and Support on Learning and its Technologies, then academic director of Center for Digital Education, which implements the MOOC strategy of EPFL (over 2 million registrations). He is full professor in learning technologies in the School of Computer & Communication Sciences, where he is the head of the CHILI Lab: "Computer-Human Interaction for Learning & Instruction ». He is the director of the leading house DUAL-T, which develops technologies for dual vocational education systems (carpenters, florists,...). With EPFL colleagues, he launched in 2017 the Swiss EdTech Collider, an incubator with 80 start-ups in learning technologies. He (co-)-founded 4 start-ups, does consulting missions in the corporate world and joined the board of several companies or institutions. In 2018, he co-founded LEARN, the EPFL Center of Learning Sciences that brings together the local initiatives in educational innovation. He is a fellow of the International Society for Learning Sciences. He currently is the Associate Vice-President for Education at EPFL.
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.
Roland SiegwartOriginaire d'Altdorf (UR) et d'Oberkirch (LU), Roland Siegwart est né en 1959 à Lausanne. Après une enfance à Schwyz, il a étudié à l'EPFZ et a obtenu son diplôme en génie mécanique en 1983. Il a travaillé ensuite comme assistant de recherche à l'EPFZ. En 1989, il a obtenu son doctorat, sa thèse traitant de l'application des paliers magnétiques sur les machines d'usinage de grande vitesse.
De 1989 à 1990, il a effectué des recherches à l'Université de Stanford en Californie (USA) et a participé à des projets en microrobotique. De retour en Suisse, il a rejoint l'Institut de robotique à l'EPFZ. Comme directeur remplaçant de l'Institut de Robotique, il a organisé les activités dans la micro- et nanorobotique. Il a mis notamment au pointuncourensystèmesélectroméca-niques appliqués.
Depuis 1990, R. Siegwart a été engagé en parallèle comme vice président de MECOS Traxler AG, une entreprise spin-off' de l'EPFZ. Il a dirigé de nombreux projets industriels dans le domaine des paliers magnétiques. ProfesseurauDépartementdemicrote-chnique de l'EPFL depuis 1996, R. Siegwart est responsable de la recherche en systèmes microtechniques autonomes. Le champ principal de ses activités porte sur les robots et les microrobots mobiles ainsi que les microsystèmes dynamiques et de très hautes performances.
