Roberto CastelloRoberto Castello is a senior scientist and group leader at the EPFL Laboratory of Solar Energy and Building Physics. Physicist by training, he has extensive experience in collecting, classifying and interpreting large datasets using advanced data mining techniques and statistical methods. He received his MSc (2007) in Particle Physics and PhD (2010) in Physics and Astrophysics from the University of Torino. He worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the Belgian National Research Fund (2011-2014) and at the CERN Experimental Physics Department (2015-2017) as a research fellow and data scientist. He is primary author of more than 20 peer-reviewed publications and he presented at major international conferences in the high energy physics domain.
In 2018 he joined the Solar Energy and Building Physics Laboratory (LESO-PB) to work on data mining and Machine Learning techniques for the built environment and renewable energy. His main research interests are: spatio-temporal modeling of renewable energy potential, energy consumption forecasting techniques, anomaly detection, and computer vision techniques for automated classification in the built environment.
He leads the group of Urban Data Mining, Intelligence and Simulation at LESO-PB and he is a member of the NRP75 Big Data project (HyEnergy) of the Swiss National Science Foundation. He is a member of the Swiss Competence Centre for Energy Research (SCCER) and deputy leader of the working group on Leveraging Ubiquitous Energy Data. He has served as a scientific committee member, workshop organizer and speaker at international conferences (ICAE 2020, Applied Machine Learning Days 2019 and 2020, CISBAT 2019 and 2021 and SDS2020).
Since 2017 he is member of the Geneva 2030 Ecosystem network, promoting the United Nations agenda towards the realization of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
Michel BierlaireBorn in 1967, Michel Bierlaire holds a PhD in Mathematical Sciences from the Facultés Universitaires Notre-Dame de la Paix, Namur, Belgium (University of Namur). Between 1995 and 1998, he was research associate and project manager at the Intelligent Transportation Systems Program of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Cambridge, Ma, USA). Between 1998 and 2006, he was a junior faculty in the Operations Research group ROSO within the Institute of Mathematics at EPFL. In 2006, he was appointed associate professor in the School of Architecture, Civil and Environmental Engineering at EPFL, where he became the director of the Transport and Mobility laboratory. Since 2009, he is the director of TraCE, the Transportation Center. From 2009 to 2017, he was the director of Doctoral Program in Civil and Environmental Engineering at EPFL. In 2012, he was appointed full professor at EPFL. Since September 2017, he is the head of the Civil Engineering Institute at EPFL. His main expertise is in the design, development and applications of models and algorithms for the design, analysis and management of transportation systems. Namely, he has been active in demand modeling (discrete choice models, estimation of origin-destination matrices), operations research (scheduling, assignment, etc.) and Dynamic Traffic Management Systems. As of August 2021, he has published 136 papers in international journals, 4 books, 41 book chapters, 193 articles in conference proceedings, 182 technical reports, and has given 195 scientific seminars. His Google Scholar h-index is 68. He is the founder, organizer and lecturer of the EPFL Advanced Continuing Education Course "Discrete Choice Analysis: Predicting Demand and Market Shares". He is the founder of hEART: the European Association for Research in Transportation. He was the founding Editor-in-Chief of the EURO Journal on Transportation and Logistics, from 2011 to 2019. He is an Associate Editor of Operations Research. He is the editor of two special issues for the journal Transportation Research Part C. He has been member of the Editorial Advisory Board (EAB) of Transportation Research Part B since 1995, of Transportation Research Part C since January 1, 2006.
Johan AuwerxJohan Auwerx is Professor at the École Polytechnique Fédérale in Lausanne, Switzerland, where he occupies the Nestle Chair in Energy Metabolism. Dr. Auwerx has been using molecular physiology and systems genetics to understand metabolism in health, aging and disease. Much of his work focused on understanding how diet, exercise and hormones control metabolism through changing the expression of genes by altering the activity of transcription factors and their associated cofactors. His work was instrumental for the development of agonists of nuclear receptors - a particular class of transcription factors - into drugs, which now are used to treat high blood lipid levels, fatty liver, and type 2 diabetes. Dr. Auwerx was amongst the first to recognize that transcriptional cofactors, which fine-tune the activity of transcription factors, act as energy sensors/effectors that influence metabolic homeostasis. His research validated these cofactors as novel targets to treat metabolic diseases, and spurred the clinical use of natural compounds, such as resveratrol, as modulators of these cofactor pathways.
Johan Auwerx was elected as a member of EMBO in 2003 and is the recipient of a dozen of international scientific prizes, including the Danone International Nutrition Award, the Oskar Minkowski Prize, and the Morgagni Gold Medal. His work is highly cited by his peers with a h-factor of over 100. He is an editorial board member of several journals, including Cell Metabolism, Molecular Systems Biology, The EMBO Journal, Journal of Cell Biology, Cell, and Science. Dr. Auwerx co-founded a handful of biotech companies, including Carex, PhytoDia, and most recently Mitobridge, and has served on several scientific advisory boards.
Dr. Auwerx received both his MD and PhD in Molecular Endocrinology at the Katholieke Universiteit in Leuven, Belgium. He was a post-doctoral research fellow in the Departments of Medicine and Genetics of the University of Washington in Seattle.
