Jan Sickmann HesthavenProf. Hesthaven received an M.Sc. in computational physics from the Technical University of Denmark (DTU) in August 1991. During the studies, the last 6 months of 1989 was spend at JET, the european fusion laboratory in Culham, UK. Following graduation, he was awarded a 3 year fellowship to begin work towards a Ph.D. at Riso National Laboratory in the Department of Optics and Fluid Dynamics. During the 3 years of study, the academic year of 1993-1994 was spend in the Division of Applied Mathematics at Brown University and three 3 months during the summer of 1994 in Department of Mathematics and Statistics at University of New Mexico. In August 1995, he recieved a Ph.D. in Numerical Analysis from the Institute of Mathematical Modelling (DTU). Following graduation in August 1995, he was awarded an NSF Postdoctoral Fellowship in Advanced Scientific Computing and was approinted Visiting Assistant Professor in the Division of Applied Mathematics at Brown University. In December of 1996, he was appointed consultant to the Institute of Computer Applications in Science and Engineering(ICASE) at NASA Langley Research Center (NASA LaRC). As of July 1999, he was appointed Assistant Professor of Applied Mathematics, in September 2000 he was awarded an Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship, as of July 2001 he was awarded a Manning Assistant Professorship, and in March 2002, he was awarded an NSF Career Award. In January 2003, he was promoted to Associate Professor of Applied Mathematics with tenure and in May 2004 he was awarded Philip J. Bray Award for Excellence in Teaching in the Sciences (the highest award given for teaching excellence in all sciences at Brown University). He was promoted to Professor of Applied Mathematics as of July 2005. From October 2006 to June 2013, he was the Founding Director of the Center for Computation and Visualization (CCV) at Brown University. As of October 2007, he holds the (honorary) title of Professor (Adjunct) at the Technical University of Denmark. In November 2009, he successfully defended his dr.techn thesis at the Technical University of Denmark and was rewarded the degree of Doctor Technices -- the highest academic distinction awarded based on ... substantial and lasting contributions that has helped to move the research area forward and penetrated into applications. As grant Co-PI he served from Aug 2010 to June 2013 as Deputy Director of the Institute of Computational and Experimental Research in Mathematics (ICERM), the newest NSF Mathematical Sciences Research Institute. After having spend his entire academic career at Brown University, Prof Hesthaven decided to pursue new challenges and joined the Mathematics Institute of Computational Science and Engineering (MATHICSE) at Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland in July 2013. In March 2014 he was elected SIAM Fellow for contributions to high-order methods for partial differential equations.
Niccolo' DiscacciatiAfter receiving my Bachelor’s degree in Mathematical Engineering from Polytechnic University of Milan (PoliMi) in 2015, I took part in the double degree Master program between EPFL and PoliMi in Computational Science and Engineering. After an internship at the Swiss National Supercomputing Center, I joined the MCSS chair as a Master student in 2018 to write my thesis. Following graduation in 2018, I am currently pursuing my doctoral studies under the supervision of Prof. Hesthaven.
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.
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.
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.