Daniel MangeDaniel Mange received the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, Switzerland. Since 1969, he has been a Professor at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology. He held a position as Visiting Professor at the Center for Reliable Computing, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, in 1987. Dr. Mange is director of the Logic Systems Laboratory and his chief interests include firmware theory (equivalence and transformation between hardwired systems and programs), cellular automata, artificial life, and embryonics (embryonic electronics). He has authored and co-authored several scientific papers in these areas, as well as the books "Microprogrammed Systems: An Introduction to Firmware Theory" (London: Chapman & Hall, 1992) and "Bio-Inspired Computing Machines" (Lausanne: Presses polytechniques et universitaires romandes, 1998). Dr. Mange was Program Co-Chairman of the First International Conference on Evolvable Systems: From Biology to Hardware (ICES96), held in Tsukuba, Japan, General Chairman of the Second International Conference on Evolvable Systems: From Biology to Hardware (ICES98), held in Lausanne in September 1998, General Chairman of the 5th International Workshop on Information Processing in Cells and Tissues (IPCAT 2003), held in Lausanne in September 2003, and general Co-Chairman of the 1st International Workshop on Biologically Inspired Approaches to Advanced Information Theory (Bio-ADIT 2004), held in Lausanne in January 2004.
Philippe ThalmannPhilippe Thalmann was born in Lausanne in 1963. He graduated in Economics from the University of Lausanne in 1984, where he earned a postgraduate diploma in Economics in 1986. Mr. Thalmann entered the doctoral program in Economics of Harvard University (Cambridge, U.S.A.) in 1986, which he completed with a Ph.D. in 1990. His dissertation is entitled: "Essays in the Economics of Government Revenues and Spending". Returning to Switzerland, he was hired as an assistant professor first at the University of Geneva (teachings in Public Economics), then at the University of Lausanne (teachings in Econometrics and Introductory Economics). Since 1994, Mr. Thalmann is associate professor of Economics as the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology at Lausanne.
Klaus KernKlaus Kern is Professor of Physics at EPFL and Director and Scientific Member at the Max-Planck-Institute for Solid State Research in Stuttgart, Germany. He also is Honorary Professor at the University of Konstanz, Germany. His present research interests are in nanoscale science, quantum technology and in microscopy at the atomic limits of space and time. He holds a chemistry degree and PhD from the University of Bonn and a honorary doctors degree from the University of Aalborg. After his doctoral studies he was staff scientist at the Research Center Jülich and visiting scientist at Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill before joining the Faculty of EPFL in 1991 and the Max-Planck-Society in 1998. Professor Kern has authored and coauthored close to 700 scientific publications, which have received nearly 60‘000 citations. He has served frequently on advisory committees to universities, professional societies and institutions and has received numerous scientific awards and honors, including the 2008 Gottfried-Wilhelm-Leibniz Prize and the 2016 Van‘t Hoff Prize. Prof. Kern has also educated a large number of leading scientists in nanoscale physics and chemistry. During the past twenty-five years he has supervised one hundred PhD students and sixty postdoctoral fellows. Today, more than fifty of his former students and postdocs hold prominent faculty positions at Universities around the world.
