Peter RyserDr. Peter Ryser is a Professor Emeritus at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne. He has over three decades of research and teaching experience from various corporate and academic institutions. He was previously a Director at Siemens Building Technologies where he was responsible for R&D, product innovation and patents. Dr. Ryser has a Ph.D. in applied Physics from the University of Geneva, a Masters degree in Experimental Physics and an MBA.
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
Cyrille HibertCyrille HIBERT received his diploma in Physics in 1994 and his PhD in 1998 from University of Orleans (FR). He then held a post doctoral position in GREMI laboratory at the University of Orleans in collaboration with Alcatel Vacuum Technology and ST Microelectronics, working in deep anisotropic etching of silicon with an Inductively Coupled Plasma reactor. In May 2000 he joined the EPFL-Center of Micro-Nano-technology where he was in charge of the plasma etching activities. He left EPFL in October 2003 for a sabbatical year to join the CFF group at NMRC (Ireland) now called Tyndall Institute. He worked on developing plasma processing. In October 2004, he came back to EPFL-CMI to be in charge of etching and nanotechnology activities (FIB and future ebeam litho).
Konstantinos BakalisKonstantinos was born in Larissa, Greece in 1986. He holds a Degree in Civil Engineering from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (2010) and an MSc with merit in Earthquake Engineering with Disaster Management from the University College London (2011). Following the completion of his MSc studies, he worked as a Discipline Engineer for the oil & gas engineering consultancy DeepSea UK as part of their Subsea Structures group. In June 2013 he joined the Institute of Steel Structures at the National Technical University of Athens, where he obtained his PhD (2018). He then served as a Research Associate for the NTUA jointly with his post-doctoral research activities at the University of Thessaly. So far, his research is focused on the seismic risk assessment of industrial facility liquid storage tanks, using nonlinear analysis methods, as well as probabilistic concepts. He has also participated in several national and international research projects, funded by the EU Research Executive Agency, the EU Research Fund for Coal and Steel and the Hellenic General Secretariat for Research and Technology. He is currently a Marie Skłodowska-Curie fellow at Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) under the EuroTechPostdoc Programme, where he explores data-driven methods that can be used for the design and assessment of infrastructure assets under uncertainty.
