Simon François Dumas PrimbaultSimon holds a PhD in the history of science from the joint programme of the European University Institute (EUI, Florence) and the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS, Paris). His doctoral dissertation focused on the drafts and working papers belonging to two natural philosophers of the second half of the 17th century – Galileo’s last disciple Vincenzio Viviani in Florence and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz in Hannover – and could be described as a work of historical anthropology of knowledge.
By addressing the ink-and-paper materiality of these supposedly purely intellectual operations that scatter the mechanical and physico-mathematical papers of Viviani and Leibniz, he aims at seizing knowledge and scholars in statu nascendi. Studying closely down to the most subtle details of the activity of the scholars’ hands on the paper of their notes, and with the support of anthropology, history of art, literature, or history of emotions, Simon hopes to flesh out anew a historical epistemology too conceptual and positivist still.
Pierre-André FarinePierre-André Farine received the Doctoral and Engineering Degrees in Microtechnology from University of Neuchâtel, Switzerland, respectively in 1984 and 1978, and the Engineering in Microtechnology from ETS Le Locle in 1974.
He was working 17 years for the Swiss watch industries (Swatch Group), including developments for high-tech products, such as pager watches, watches including integrated sensors such as pressure, compass, altimeter and temperature sensors for Tissot. He was also involved in prototypes developments for watches including GPS and cellular GSM phones.
Since 8 years, he is Professor in Electronics and Signal Processing at the Institute of Microtechnology IMT, University of Neuchâtel, Switzerland. Full professor at EPFL since January 1st, 2009, he works in the field of low-power integrated products for portable devices, including microelectronics for wireless telecommunications, UWB and GNSS systems. He is Head of the Electronics and Signal Processing Laboratory ESPLAB of the EPFL IMT-NE. His laboratory works also for video and audio compression algorithms and their implementation in low power integrated circuits.
Bixio RimoldiBixio Rimoldi received the Dipl. El.-Ing degree as well as the Dr. ès Sciences degree from the ETHZ, Switzerland. Since 1997, he holds a full professor position at the School of Computer and Communication Sciences at EPFL and he is the director of EPFL's Mobile Communications Laboratory (LCM). Prior to joining EPFL, he was in the faculty of the Electrical Engineering department of Washington University.
In 1993, he received a US National Science Foundation Young Investigator Award. In 2000, he was elected to the grade of Fellow of the IEEE. During the period 2002-2009 he has been on the Board of Governors of the IEEE Information Theory Society, where he served in several offices including President. He was co-chairman with Bruce Hajek of the 1995 IEEE Information Theory Workshop on Information Theory, Multiple Access, and Queueing (St Louis, MO), and co-chairman with Jim Massey of the 2002 IEEE International Symposium in Information Theory (Lausanne, Switzerland). He has been a member of the editorial board of "Foundations and Trends on Communications and Information Theory," and was an editor of the European Transactions on Telecommunications. During 2005 and 2006 he was the Director of EPFL's Bachelor program in Communication Systems.
His interests are in various aspects of digital communications, information theory, and software-defined radio.
Florence Graezer BideauSenior Lecturer and Senior Scientist at the College of Humanities and at the School of Architecture, EPFLVisiting Professor at the Department of Architecture and Design, Politecnico di Torino PhD in History and Civilization (EHESS, Paris) Director of the Minor in Area and Cultural Studies (MACS) between 2012 and 2016Member of the Research group Heritage, culture and the cityAssociated researcher at the China Room Research Group and South China-Torino Collaboration Lab, Politecnico di Torino Associate member of the Laboratoire d’anthropologie culturelle et sociale (LACS), UNIL Member of the EDAR committee (Doctoral Program Architecture and Sciences of the City) at the School of Architecture, Civil and Environment Engineering in EPFL Florence Graezer Bideau trained as an anthropologist and a sinologist, and received her PhD in History and Civilization in 2005. Before joining the Centre for Area and Cultural Studies (CACS) at EPFL in 2010, she was a lecturer in anthropology at the University of Lausanne, where she taught courses in cultural theory and fieldwork methodology. She is Senior Lecturer and Senior Scientist at the College of Humanities where she teaches area studies, anthropology of China, critical heritage studies and urban studies. She has been acting as Director of the Minor in Area and Cultural Studies between 2012 and 2016 and she is currently a member of the EDAR committee (Doctoral Program Architecture and Sciences of the City) at the School of Architecture, Civil and Environment Engineering in EPFL. Since 2015, Florence has also been Visiting Professor at the Department of Architecture and Design, Politecnico di Torino, Italy. Her fields of expertise include anthropology of China, urban sociology, modes of sociability and governmentality. Florence’s research is on the relation between culture and power (making of cultural policy in China; emergence of maker movement (makerspaces) and politics of innovation in China), heritage issues (process of heritagization and multiculturalism in Malaysia and Singapore; implementation of the UNESCO Convention for Safeguarding Intangible Cultural Heritage in Switzerland; historic urban landscape in heritage policy of Beijing, Rome and Mexico City), and the making of the city (informal resistances toward the violence of urbanism in Caracas, Chennai and Guangzhou; uses of public spaces in Chinese new towns).
Martin HaslerAfter a PhD and a postdoc in theoretical physics, Martin Hasler has pursued reasearch in electrical circuit and filter theory. His current interests are the applications of nonlinear dynamics in engineering and biology. In particular, he is interested in information processing in biological and technological networks. He is most well-known for his work in communications using chaos and in synchronization of networks of dynamical systems.
He joined EPFL in 1974, became a titular professor in 1984 and a full professor in 1998. In 2002, he was acting Dean of the School of Computer and Communication Sciences. He was elected Fellow of the IEEE in 1993. He was the general chair of ISCAS 2000 in Geneva. He was Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions in Circuits and Systems from 1991 to 1993 and Editor-in-Chief from 1993 to 1995. He was elected vice-president for Technical Activities of the IEEE Circuits and Systems Society from 2002 to 2005. He is a member of the Research Council of the Swiss National Science Foundation.
Babak FalsafiBabak is a Professor in the School of Computer and Communication Sciences and the founding director of the EcoCloud, an industrial/academic consortium at EPFL investigating scalable data-centric technologies. He has made numerous contributions to computer system design and evaluation including a scalable multiprocessor architecture which was prototyped by Sun Microsystems (now Oracle), snoop filters and memory streaming technologies that are incorporated into IBM BlueGene/P and Q and ARM cores, and computer system performance evaluation methodologies that have been in use by AMD, HP and Google PerKit . He has shown that hardware memory consistency models are neither necessary (in the 90's) nor sufficient (a decade later) to achieve high performance in multiprocessor systems. These results eventually led to fence speculation in modern microprocessors. His latest work on workload-optimized server processors laid the foundation for the first generation of Cavium ARM server CPUs, ThunderX. He is a recipient of an NSF CAREER award, IBM Faculty Partnership Awards, and an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship. He is a fellow of IEEE and ACM.
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]
