Olivier SchneiderAfter his thesis defense in particle physics in 1989 at University of Lausanne, Olivier Schneider joins LBL, the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory (California), to work on the CDF experiment at the Tevatron in Fermilab (Illinois), first as a research fellow supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation, and later as a post-doc at LBL. He participates in the construction and commissioning of the first silicon vertex detector to operate successfully at a hadron collider; this detector enabled the discovery of the sixth quark, named "top". Since 1994, he comes back to Europe and participates in the ALEPH experiment at CERN's Large Electron-Positron Collider, as CERN fellow and then as CERN scientific staff. He specializes in heavy flavour physics. In 1998, he becomes associate professor at University of Lausanne, then extraordinary professor at the Swiss Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL) in 2003, and finally full professor at EPFL in 2010. Having worked since 1997 on the preparation of the LHCb experiment at CERN's Large Hadron Collider, which started operation in 2009, he is now analyzing the first data. He also contributes since 2001 to the exploitation of the data recorded at the Belle experiment (KEK laboratory, Tsukuba, Japan). These two experiments study mainly the decays of hadrons containing a b quark, as well CP violation, i.e. the non-invariance under the symmetry between matter and antimatter.
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.
Ambrogio FasoliAmbrogio FASOLI was born on November 10, 1964, in Milano, Italy. After a classical high school diploma (Maturità Classica) and graduation from the University of Milano, with the degree of Dottore in Fisica, he obtained his Phd at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale (EPFL) with a thesis on chaos in wave-particle interactions in plasmas, which was awarded the Best EPFL Thesis prize, in 1993. He then moved to the JET Joint Undertaking, the largest worlds fusion device, near Oxford, UK, to investigate Alfvén waves and burning plasma physics. In 1995-1996 he took a sabbatical leave, visiting several Universities and Research Institutes in Europe and in the USA, including three months at General Atomics in San Diego. In 1996-1997, during a second period at JET, he participated in the fusion power worlds record experiments in Deuterium-Tritium plasmas at JET. In 1997 he was nominated Assistant Professor in MIT Physics Department, where he led a basic plasma physics group and the international collaboration between MIT and JET. In 2001 Ambrogio FASOLI was nominated Assistant Professor of Physics at EPFL, Lausanne, Switzerland, and Professeur Boursier of the Swiss National Science Foundation. He became member of CRPP Directorate and took the leadership of CRPP basic plasma physics group and of the TCV tokamak, one of the major fusion experiments worldwide. At European level he was scientific coordinator for JET experiments, spokesperson for multi-machine experiments in the frame of International Tokamak Physics Activities, and Project Leader for a JET Enhancement project. In 2005 he became Associate Professor of Physics with tenure at EPFL, then member of EFDA Science and Technology Advisory Committee, and of the Steering Committee of the Association EURATOM-Swiss Confederation. From 2006 he was also Deputy Director, then from 2007 Executive Director of CRPP and from 2008 Full Professor of Physics at EPFL. For a number of years he was the Chair of the EPFL Physics Strategic Committee and a member of the Directorate of the EPFL School of Sciences. Since the summer of 2014 Professor FASOLI was the sole Director of CRPP. He now represents Switzerland in the EUROfusion General Assembly and Bureau, and in the Governing Board for Fusion for Energy. He is member of the EUROfusion DEMO project Board, of the Scientific Board of the Helmotz Virtual Institute on Advanced Microwave Diagnostics, of the European Delegation for the Cooperation between Euratom and the Government of India in Fusion Energy Research, of the European Consortium for the development of the ITER gyratron (EGYC), and participates to numerous international review panels. He chairs the FuseNet Academic Council, the International Advisory Panel for the Laboratory of Excellence Plas@Par in the Sorbonne Universities, the European Consortium for the construction of the ITER microwave Upper Launcher (ECHUL), and the Promotion Committee of the EPFL Faculty of Basic Sciences. He is one the three European representatives in the International Tokamak Physics Activities Coordinating Committee, advising ITER, and the Editor-in-Chief of the IAEA journal Nuclear Fusion. Since January 2019, Ambrogio Fasoli is the Chair of the General Assembly, i.e. the president of EUROfusion, the European Consortium for Development of Fusion Energy. Professor FASOLI is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and since 2001 a Visiting Professor at MIT Physics Department. He is the Director of the Swiss Plasma Center.
Pierre VandergheynstPierre Vandergheynst received the M.S. degree in physics and the Ph.D. degree in mathematical physics from the Université catholique de Louvain, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium, in 1995 and 1998, respectively. From 1998 to 2001, he was a Postdoctoral Researcher with the Signal Processing Laboratory, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL), Lausanne, Switzerland. He was Assistant Professor at EPFL (2002-2007), where he is now a Full Professor of Electrical Engineering and, by courtesy, of Computer and Communication Sciences. As of 2015, Prof. Vandergheynst serves as EPFL’s Vice-Provost for Education. His research focuses on harmonic analysis, sparse approximations and mathematical data processing in general with applications covering signal, image and high dimensional data processing, computer vision, machine learning, data science and graph-based data processing. He was co-Editor-in-Chief of Signal Processing (2002-2006), Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing (2007-2011), the flagship journal of the signal processing community and currently serves as Associate Editor of Computer Vision and Image Understanding and SIAM Imaging Sciences. He has been on the Technical Committee of various conferences, serves on the steering committee of the SPARS workshop and was co-General Chairman of the EUSIPCO 2008 conference. Pierre Vandergheynst is the author or co-author of more than 70 journal papers, one monograph and several book chapters. He has received two IEEE best paper awards. Professor Vandergheynst is a laureate of the Apple 2007 ARTS award and of the 2009-2010 De Boelpaepe prize of the Royal Academy of Sciences of Belgium.
Pascal FuaPascal Fua received an engineering degree from Ecole Polytechnique, Paris, in 1984 and the Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from the University of Orsay in 1989. He then worked at SRI International and INRIA Sophia-Antipolis as a Computer Scientist. He joined EPFL in 1996 where he is now a Professor in the School of Computer and Communication Science and heads the Computer Vision Laboratory. His research interests include shape modeling and motion recovery from images, analysis of microscopy images, and Augmented Reality. His research interests include shape modeling and motion recovery from images, analysis of microscopy images, and machine learning. He has (co)authored over 300 publications in refereed journals and conferences. He is an IEEE Fellow and has been an Associate Editor of IEEE journal Transactions for Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence. He often serves as program committee member, area chair, and program chair of major vision conferences and has cofounded three spinoff companies (Pix4D, PlayfulVision, and NeuralConcept).
