Martin VetterliMartin Vetterli was appointed president of EPFL by the Federal Council following a selection process conducted by the ETH Board, which unanimously nominated him.
Professor Vetterli was born on 4 October 1957 in Solothurn and received his elementary and secondary education in Neuchâtel Canton. He earned a Bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from ETH Zurich (ETHZ) in 1981, a Master’s of Science degree from Stanford University in 1982, and a PhD from EPFL in 1986. Professor Vetterli taught at Columbia University as an assistant and then associate professor. He was subsequently named full professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at the University of California at Berkeley before returning to EPFL as a full professor at the age of 38. He has also taught at ETHZ and Stanford University.
Professor Vetterli has earned numerous national and international awards for his research in electrical engineering, computer science and applied mathematics, including the National Latsis Prize in 1996. He is a fellow of both the Association for Computing Machinery and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and a member the US National Academy of Engineering. He has published over 170 articles and three reference works.
Professor Vetterli’s work on the theory of wavelets, which are used in signal processing, is considered to be of major importance by his peers, and his areas of expertise, including image and video compression and self-organized communication systems, are central to the development of new information technologies. As the founding director of the National Centre of Competence in Research on Mobile Information and Communication Systems, Professor Vetterli is a staunch advocate of transdisciplinary research.
Professor Vetterli knows EPFL inside and out. An EPFL graduate himself, he began been teaching at the school in 1995, was vice president for International Affairs and then Institutional Affairs from 2004 to 2011, and served as dean of the School of Computer and Communication Sciences in 2011 and 2012. In addition to his role as president of the National Research Council of the Swiss National Science Foundation, a position he held from 2013 to 2016, he heads the EPFL’s Audiovisual Communications Laboratory (LCAV) since 1995.
Professor Vetterli has supported more than 60 students in Switzerland and the United States in their doctoral work and makes a point of following their highly successful careers, whether it is in the academic or business world.
He is the author of some 50 patents, some of which were the basis for start-ups coming out of his lab, such as Dartfish and Illusonic, while others were sold (e.g. Qualcomm) as successful examples of technology transfer. He actively encourages young researchers to market the results of their work.
Anthony Christopher DavisonAnthony Davison has published on a wide range of topics in statistical theory and methods, and on environmental, biological and financial applications. His main research interests are statistics of extremes, likelihood asymptotics, bootstrap and other resampling methods, and statistical modelling, with a particular focus on the first currently. Statistics of extremes concerns rare events such as storms, high winds and tides, extreme pollution episodes, sporting records, and the like. The subject has a long history, but under the impact of engineering and environmental problems has been an area of intense development in the past 20 years. Davison''s PhD work was in this area, in a project joint between the Departments of Mathematics and Mechanical Engineering at Imperial College, with the aim of modelling potential high exposures to radioactivity due to releases from nuclear installations. The key tools developed, joint with Richard Smith, were regression models for exceedances over high thresholds, which generalized earlier work by hydrologists, and formed the basis of some important later developments. This has led to an ongoing interest in extremes, and in particular their application to environmental and financial data. A major current interest is the development of suitable methods for modelling rare spatio-temporal events, particularly but not only in the context of climate change. Likelihood asymptotics too have undergone very substantial development since 1980. Key tools here have been saddlepoint and related approximations, which can give remarkably accurate approximate distribution and density functions even for very small sample sizes. These approximations can be used for wide classes of parametric models, but also for certain bootstrap and resampling problems. The literature on these methods can seem arcane, but they are potentially widely applicable, and Davison wrote a book joint with Nancy Reid and Alessandra Brazzale intended to promote their use in applications. Bootstrap methods are now used in many areas of application, where they can provide a researcher with accurate inferences tailor-made to the data available, rather than relying on large-sample or other approximations of doubtful validity. The key idea is to replace analytical calculations of biases, variances, confidence and prediction intervals, and other measures of uncertainty with computer simulation from a suitable statistical model. In a nonparametric situation this model consists of the data themselves, and the simulation simply involves resampling from the existing data, while in a parametric case it involves simulation from a suitable parametric model. There is a wide range of possibilities between these extremes, and the book by Davison and Hinkley explores these for many data examples, with the aim of showing how and when resampling methods succeed and why they can fail. He was Editor of Biometrika (2008-2017), Joint Editor of Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, series B (2000-2003), editor of the IMS Lecture Notes Monograph Series (2007), Associate Editor of Biometrika (1987-1999), and Associate Editor of the Brazilian Journal of Probability and Statistics (1987 2006). Currently he on the editorial board of Annual Reviews of Statistics and its Applications. He has served on committees of Royal Statistical Society and of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics. He is an elected Fellow of the American Statistical Assocation and of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, an elected member of the International Statistical Institute, and a Chartered Statistician. In 2009 he was awarded a laurea honoris causa in Statistical Science by the University of Padova, in 2011 he held a Francqui Chair at Hasselt University, and in 2012 he was Mitchell Lecturer at the University of Glasgow. In 2015 he received the Guy Medal in Silver of the Royal Statistical Society and in 2018 was a Medallion Lecturer of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics.
Volkan CevherVolkan Cevher received the B.Sc. (valedictorian) in electrical engineering from Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey, in 1999 and the Ph.D. in electrical and computer engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, GA in 2005. He was a Research Scientist with the University of Maryland, College Park from 2006-2007 and also with Rice University in Houston, TX, from 2008-2009. Currently, he is an Associate Professor at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne and a Faculty Fellow in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at Rice University. His research interests include machine learning, signal processing theory, optimization theory and methods, and information theory. Dr. Cevher is an ELLIS fellow and was the recipient of the Google Faculty Research award in 2018, the IEEE Signal Processing Society Best Paper Award in 2016, a Best Paper Award at CAMSAP in 2015, a Best Paper Award at SPARS in 2009, and an ERC CG in 2016 as well as an ERC StG in 2011.
Jean-Philippe ThiranJean-Philippe Thiran was born in Namur, Belgium, in August 1970. He received the Electrical Engineering degree and the PhD degree from the Université catholique de Louvain (UCL), Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium, in 1993 and 1997, respectively. From 1993 to 1997, he was the co-ordinator of the medical image analysis group of the Communications and Remote Sensing Laboratory at UCL, mainly working on medical image analysis. Dr Jean-Philippe Thiran joined the Signal Processing Institute (ITS) of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL), Lausanne, Switzerland, in February 1998 as a senior lecturer. He was promoted to Assistant Professor in 2004, to Associate Professor in 2011 and is now a Full Professor since 2020. He also holds a 20% position at the Department of Radiology of the University of Lausanne (UNIL) and of the Lausanne University Hospital (CHUV) as Associate Professor ad personam. Dr Thiran's current scientific interests include
Computational medical imaging: acquisition, reconstruction and analysis of imaging data, with emphasis on regularized linear inverse problems (compressed sensing, convex optimization). Applications to medical imaging: diffusion MRI, ultrasound imaging, inverse planning in radiotherapy, etc.Computer vision & machine learning: image and video analysis, with application to facial expression recognition, eye tracking, lip reading, industrial inspection, medical image analysis, etc.
Pina MarzilianoPina Marziliano obtained her Bachelors of Science degree in Applied Mathematics and Masters of Science degree in Computer Science in 1994 and 1996, respectively, from the Universite de Montreal. She completed the pioneering Doctoral School program in the Communications Systems Department at the EPFL in 1997 and obtained her PhD degree in 2001. Her professional career began as a Senior Research Engineer in a start-up company called Genimedia SA in Lausanne, Switzerland where she developed perceptual quality metrics for multimedia applications which led her to two highly cited (>100) journal and conference papers, as well as, the filing of a patent. In 2003, she became an Assistant Professor for the Division of Information Engineering in the School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at the Nanyang Technological University in Singapore focusing her research in biomedical signal and image processing. In 2006, she was seconded to NTU’s International Relations Office for one year where she co-strategized the university international partnerships and conceptualised the Global Partnership Management and Analysis Tool. She received the IEEE Signal Processing Society 2006 Best Paper Award for the article entitled "Sampling Signals with Finite Rate of Innovation" co-authored with Martin Vetterli and Thierry Blu. Later that year patents on the same topic were acquired by Qualcomm Inc., USA, followed by consultancy work which led to obtaining US200KindustryresearchgrantfromQualcomm. In2009,aworkshopco−organisedbyNTU’sCollegeofEngineeringandTanTockSengHospitalandpartneroftheNTU−ImperialCollegeMedicalSchoolsparkedseveralresearchcollaborationswithdoctorsfromtheOphthalmologyDepartmentandDiagnosticRadiologyDepartmentwhichhaveledtojointinternationalconferenceandjournalpublications,significant(>SGD3M) joint research funding and a granted US patent. Apart from her research achievements, she has served as an Associate Editor for IEEE Signal Processing Letters, IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing, a technical reviewer for more than a dozen international conference and Tier-1 journal publications, as well as, a Technical Program Committee member of international conferences and voted in as member of the highly selective Signal Processing Theory and Methods Technical Committee in the IEEE Signal Processing Society. She has served as the Chair of the IEEE Singapore Section Women In Engineering (WIE) Affinity Group where she spearheaded and co-organized monthly technical and social activities, thus increasing the group’s visibility in the IEEE Singapore Section. With her leadership and initiatives, the group received the 2009 Honourable Mention Women in Engineering Affinity Group of the Year Award from the IEEE WIE Committee in the USA. In 2011, she was the General Chair of the 9th International Conference on Sampling Theory and Applications, co-organised by the School of EEE and School of Physical and Mathematical Sciences, NTU. This interdisciplinary conference and flagship event of her research community was held for the first time in Asia on the NTU campus. It gathered 132 participants comprising of mathematicians, engineers and applied scientists from 26 countries around the globe. In 2012, she was tenured and promoted to Associate Professor at the Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. Besides pursuing her academic career, she has been actively involved in technology transfer and entrepreneurship co-founding a design company (PABensen) and a biotechnology spin-off BIORITHM. In 2019, Pina Marziliano was appointed Executive Director of the Centre for Biomedical Imaging (CIBM), a centre composed of five partner institutions HUG, UNIGE, EPFL, UNIL and CHUV located in a 50km radius of the Lemans region in Switzerland. The unique union of reputable clinicians, academics and researchers combined with the capabilities of developing cutting edge technology and housing the latest state-of-the art equipment, is her source of inspiration and drive in leading CIBM, a world reknowned Centre of Excellence in Biomedical Imaging. 