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 Maxime Carl FelderMaxime Felder holds a PhD in sociology from the University of Geneva. His dissertation - "Building familiarity. Coexistence in an urban context" - dealt with how urbanites manage to coexist peacefully, in a residential context, without knowing each other personally. He is now involved in a new research project on cities' hospitality towards newcomers.
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.
Sila KaratasSıla Karataş (1987, Ankara) was graduated as architect and awarded Master’s degree with the thesis “Building Marshall Plan in Turkey: The Formation of Workers’ Housing Question, 1946-1962” at the Middle East Technical University. In her thesis, she analyzed the formation of postwar workers’ housing discourse concerning the policy, planning and architecture of workers’ housing cooperatives within the framework of the ideological and spatial programming of the Marshall Plan and Americanization in Turkey. This research received Honourable Mention in 'Young Social Scientists Awards' of the Turkish Social Sciences Association. She worked as assistant and lecturer in Turkey between 2012-2019; took part in architectural and urban design studios as tutor and reviewer, gave Case Studies in Social Housing and Community Planning among other courses. Since September 2019, she is a PhD student and doctoral assistant at EPFL. Her PhD research concerns postwar workers’ housing programs of the Mediterranean countries participated in the Marshall Plan (France, Italy, Greece, Turkey), and is a comparative analysis of local models in relation to the transnational activity by the United States and multilateral organizations on postwar development, labour affairs and housing. This research is awarded a Swiss Government Excellence Scholarship for PhD and being funded by the Swiss Federal Commission for Scholarships for Foreign Scholars and Artists (FCS).
Aurèle ParriauxAurèle Parriaux studied geology at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL) in Lausanne, Switzerland. He obtained his Ph.D. in hydrogeology and followed several postgraduate courses in hydrogeology, operational hydrology and geotechnics. He acquired a wide experience in engineering geology in the fields of motorway construction, geological hazards, underground water and geomaterials prospecting as well as the management of natural resources.
In 1991, he was appointed full Professor of Engineering Geology at EPFL and presently he is head of the Engineering and Environmental Geology Laboratory (GEOLEP) at the same institute. He leads a research team of about twenty people specializing in the fields of geological hazards and underground resources.
Professor Parriaux has significant teaching responsibilities. He teaches geology to students in 'Civil Engineering' and 'Environmental Sciences and Engineering'. Moreover, he teaches Engineering Geology at the Universitiy of Lausanne.
Parallel to his research and teaching, Aurèle Parriaux carries out expert appraisals in various fields of engineering and environmental geology. In particular, the recent appraisal of the compatibility between construction of tunnels and protection of groundwater resources.
Since the creation of the new School of Architecture, Civil and Environmental Engineering (ENAC) at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, he participates in the teaching related to territory and landscape into which he brings the geological and geomorphologic component.
Aurèle Parriaux is active in several international organizations. He was chairman of the Swiss Hydrogeological Society for six years. From 2001 to 2006 he was Director of the Civil Engineering Section of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology of Lausanne.
In 2006, he published his book "Géologie: bases pour l'ingénieur". The second edition of this successful textbook has been published in 2009. In competition with 105 scientific books, Géologie : bases pour l'ingénieur received the Roberval Prize in 2007. The publisher CRC Press/Balkema, member of the Taylor & Francis Group, publishes an English translation of the book (Geology: basics for Engineers, 2009).
In December 2008, Prof. Parriaux was nominated Chevalier of the Order of Academic Palms by the Prime Minister of the Republic of France.
In September 2011, he left the EPFL to dedicate his time to being an independent expert. Prof. Parriaux is currently based at Chemin de Crêt de Plan 103 in La Conversion CH-1093 (www.parriauxgeo.ch). He is continuing his collaboration with EPFL, especially on the DEEP CITY Project and on landslide research. Valentin Daniel Maurice BourdonValentin Bourdon is an architect, postdoctoral researcher and teaching assistant. He obtained the french architectural diploma in 2013 from the École d’Architecture de la Ville et des Territoires Paris-Est at Marne-la-Vallée under the direction of Jacques Lucan, and completed his PhD at EPFL in 2020, under the supervision of Luca Ortelli. Since September 2021, he coordinates the Habitat Research Center at EPFL. Involved in the studies of the Laboratory of Construction and Conservation between 2017 and 2021, he also contributes in the supervision of its Housing Studio - Project Theory and Criticism for architecture bachelor. During his doctoral research, he benefited of an academic stay at Metrolab Brussels in 2019 with the support of the SNSF, and published multiple scientific and non-academic publications. His arrival in Switzerland and return to the academic world take place after a thorough professional experience in the parisian office MGAU Michel Guthmann Architecture Urbanisme. From 2010 to 2016, he participed to the majority of its developed projects and supervised several of them, both collective dwellings projects and urban projects.
Devis TuiaI come from Ticino and studied in Lausanne, between UNIL and EPFL. After my PhD at UNIL in remote sensing, I was postdoc in Valencia (Spain), Boulder (CO) and EPFL, working on model adaptation and prior knowledge integration in machine learning. In 2014 I became Research Assistant Professor at University of Zurich, where I started the 'multimodal remote sensing' group. In 2017, I joined Wageningen University (NL), where I was professor of the GeoInformation Science and Remote Sensing Laboratory. Since 2020, I joined EPFL Valais, to start the ECEO lab, working at the interface between Earth observation, machine learning and environmental sciences.
Dieter DietzDieter Dietz has been educated at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich and has studied at the Cooper Union in New York City with Diller/Scofidio. He has received his degree in architecture in 1991 at ETH Zurich. He has worked with Diane Lewis Architects in New York and with Herzog & de Meuron in Basel. With partner architect Urs Egg he was a founding member of UNDEND Architecture in Zurich in 1997, an architectural practice with award winning entries in national and international competitions. Currently he is building up dieterdietz.org, a firm engaging in projects in urban design, media and architecture. From 1996 to 1999 Dieter Dietz has taught as Junior Faculty with Professor Marc Angélil at ETH Zurich. Since 2006 Dieter Dietz is Associate Professor for Architectural Design at EPFL in Lausanne and director of the ALICE laboratory in the ENAC faculty. He collaborates with the ALICE team on research projects at diverse scales with labs inside and outside EPFL. His teaching activities include the direction of the first year architectural design course as well as projects at master and thesis level.
