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.
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. David Atienza AlonsoDavid Atienza Alonso is an associate professor of EE and director of the Embedded Systems Laboratory (ESL) at EPFL, Switzerland. He received his MSc and PhD degrees in computer science and engineering from UCM, Spain, and IMEC, Belgium, in 2001 and 2005, respectively. His research interests include system-level design methodologies for multi-processor system-on-chip (MPSoC) servers and edge AI architectures. Dr. Atienza has co-authored more than 350 papers, one book, and 12 patents in these previous areas. He has also received several recognitions and award, among them, the ICCAD 10-Year Retrospective Most Influential Paper Award in 2020, Design Automation Conference (DAC) Under-40 Innovators Award in 2018, the IEEE TCCPS Mid-Career Award in 2018, an ERC Consolidator Grant in 2016, the IEEE CEDA Early Career Award in 2013, the ACM SIGDA Outstanding New Faculty Award in 2012, and a Faculty Award from Sun Labs at Oracle in 2011. He has also earned two best paper awards at the VLSI-SoC 2009 and CST-HPCS 2012 conference, and five best paper award nominations at the DAC 2013, DATE 2013, WEHA-HPCS 2010, ICCAD 2006, and DAC 2004 conferences. He serves or has served as associate editor of IEEE Trans. on Computers (TC), IEEE Design & Test of Computers (D&T), IEEE Trans. on CAD (T-CAD), IEEE Transactions on Sustainable Computing (T-SUSC), and Elsevier Integration. He was the Technical Program Chair of DATE 2015 and General Chair of DATE 2017. He served as President of IEEE CEDA in the period 2018-2019 and was GOLD member of the Board of Governors of IEEE CASS from 2010 to 2012. He is a Distinguished Member of ACM and an IEEE Fellow.
Andrea RidolfiI am a professor of Signal Processing and Communication Technologies at Bern University of Applied Sciences.
Since 2004 I hold a lecturer position at EPFL, teaching “Mathematical Principles of Signal Processing” (Doctoral School, 2004 – 2011), “Statistical Signal and Data Processing through Applications” (Master Program, (2004 – ongoing), and Signal Processing and Machine Learning for Digital Humanities (Master, 2017 – 2019, co-taught with Mathieu Salzmann).
Previously, I have been working as Project Manager and R&D Engineer at EPFL (2011-2014), coordinating the LCAV activities within the NSF – Nanotera project Opensense, and as Project Manager and R&D Engineer with the biomedical signal processing group at CSEM (2006-2011).
