Alain WegmannAlain Wegmann joined EPFL in 1996. His interests are in techniques to better align business and IT. He developed, with his group and partners, the SEAM methods: SEAM for business (strategic thinking), SEAM for enterprise architecture (business/IT alignment) and SEAM for software (IT). The originality of SEAM is in the integration of generic systems thinking principles into discipline-specific methods. This integration has three benefits: (1) the possibility to relate the different disciplines (by having common systemic principles); (2) the capability to leverage on discipline-specific knowledge (by using the vocabulary and the heuristics of each discipline) and (3) to be more efficient in solving problems (by benefiting from the problem solving techniques developed in systems thinking). SEAM is currently applied in master courses and consulting. Consulting is done for start-ups developing their business and technology strategies and for large companies having service-oriented architecture projects.
Prior to joining EPFL, Alain Wegmann worked for 14 years with Logitech in software development/engineering management (Switzerland, Taiwan, US), manufacturing (Taiwan) and marketing (US). When he left Logitech, Alain Wegmann was engineering vice-president and marketing director for large accounts.
Mirko MarrasMirko Marras was born on April 19, 1992 in Iglesias (Italy). He is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Digital Vocational Education and Training • Machine Learning for Education Laboratory of EPFL - Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (Switzerland). He received a PhD in Computer Science in 2020 and a MSc Degree in Computer Science (summa cum laude, 18 months) in 2016, from University of Cagliari (Italy). He received the Computer Science Engineering certification from the University of Pisa (Italy) in 2016.
In 2015, he was involved as Researcher within UnitelCagliari (Italy) for the ELIOS project (MIUR, 1ME). In 2017, he spent five months as Visiting Scholar at EURECAT (Spain), collaborating with the Data Science and Big Data Analytics Unit on the DECODE project (EU, 16P, 5ME). In 2018, he spent three months as Visiting Scholar within the University Institute for Intelligent Systems and Digital Applications in Engineering (SIANI) at the Universidad de Las Palmas de Gran Canaria (Spain). In 2019, he spent two months at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering of the New York University: Tandon School of Engineering (U.S.A). He has been involved as Researcher in the ILEARNTV project (MIUR, 6P, 10ME) since 2018. From 2019, he is referral of the University of Cagliari (Italy) for two work packages under the EDUC project (EU, 6P, 5ME). He has been teaching assistant for the “Computer Networks” course since 2017 and thesis assistant since 2018 at the University of Cagliari (Italy).
In 2014, he was recognized as the best third-year student of the BSc Program in Computer Science of the University of Cagliari (Italy). In 2016, he was recognized as the best MSc student of the Faculty of Science and one of the top 12 MSc students of the same University. In 2018, he got to the podium of the Call for Visionary Ideas - Education Section event organized by Nesta Italia. He has received the Best Poster Award at the European Semantic Web Conference 2017 (ESWC2017), the Demo Honorable Mention at The Web Conference 2018 (WWW2018) and the Best Paper Award at Didamatica Conference 2018. He has been awarded two Erasmus PlaceDoc scholaships to spend 5 months at EURECAT (Spain) and 3 months at Universidad de Las Palmas de Gran Canaria (Spain), respectively. Moreover, he has been awarded a GlobusDoc scholarship to spend 2 months at New York University: Tandon School of Engineering (U.S.A).
His current research focuses on Data Mining and Machine Learning with a focus on Education. He has co-authored papers in top-tier international journals, such as Pattern Recognition Letters (Elsevier), Computers in Human Behavior (Elsevier), Information Processing & Management (Elsevier), and IEEE Cloud Computing. His research activity also brought him to give talks (e.g., ECIR 2019 and INTERSPEECH 2019), demos (e.g., TheWebConf 2018 and AVI 2020), and tutorials (e.g., UMAP 2020 and ICDM 2020) at several international conferences. He is part of the program committee of main international conferences, such as ACL, AIED, ECML-PKDD, EDM, EMNLP, ITICSE, INTERSPEECH, ICALT, and UMAP. He has been also acting as a reviewer for top-tier journals, such as Pattern Recognition Letters and IEEE Transactions on Image Processing. He has been also co-chairing the BIAS@ECIR2020 and BIAS@ECIR2021 workshops. He has served as a guest editor for a special issue of Information Processing & Management (Elsevier) and Future Generation Compter Systems (Elsevier). He has been involved in several national and European projects (e.g., iLearnTV, DECODE, EDUC). He is a member of several national and international associations, including CVPL, AIxIA, IEEE, and ACM.
Marc Lafuente MartinezScientist, researcher, policy advisor, teacher and educator in general. Also, street flâneur and amateur chess player. Marc focuses his research on educational innovation and learning improvement, digital technologies and system change.Marc holds a PhD. in Educational Psychology at the University of Barcelona where he also taught. He's been an international policy analyst at the OECD where he led a project on pedagogical innovation addressed to a number of education ministries. Apart from his current research at EPFL on topics like computational thinking, project-based learning, and ethical competence, he collaborates with several think-tanks and governmental agencies.
