Concept
Semantics (computer science)
Related people (24)
Martin Odersky
Martin Odersky heads the programming research group at EPFL. His research interests cover fundamental as well as applied aspects of programming languages. They include semantics, type systems, programming language design, and compiler construction. The main focus if his work lies in the integration of object-oriented and functional programming. His research thesis is that the two paradigms are just two sides of the same coin and should be unified as much as possible. To prove this he has experimented a number of language designs, from Pizza to GJ to Functional Nets. He has also influenced the development of Java as a co-designer of Java generics and as the original author of the current javac reference compiler. His current work concentrates on the Scala programming language, which unifies FP and OOP, while staying completely interoperable with Java and .NET.
Martin Odersky got his doctorate from ETHZ, in 1989. He held research positions at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center from 1989 and at Yale University from 1991. He was then a professor at the University of Karlsruhe from 1993 and at the University of South Australia from 1997. He joined EPFL as full professor in 1999. He is associate editor of the Journal of Functional Programming and member of IFIP WG 2.8. He was conference chair for ICFP 2000, and program chair for ECOOP 2004 as well as ETAPS/CC 2007.
Viktor Kuncak
Viktor Kunčak joined EPFL in 2007, after receiving a PhD degree from MIT. Since then has been leading the Laboratory for Automated Reasoning and Analysis and supervised at least 12 completed PhD theses. His works on languages, algorithms and systems for verification and automated reasoning. He served as an initiator and one of the coordinators of a European network (COST action) in the area of automated reasoning, verification, and synthesis. In 2012 he received a 5-year single-investigator European Research Council (ERC) grant of 1.5M EUR. His invited talks include those at Lambda Days, Scala Days, NFM, LOPSTR, SYNT, ICALP, CSL, RV, VMCAI, and SMT. A paper on test generation he co-authored received an ACM SIGSOFT distinguished paper award at ICSE. A PLDI paper he co-authored was published in the Communications of the ACM as a Research Highlight article. His Google Scholar profile reports an over-approximate H-index of 38. He was an associate editor of ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems (TOPLAS) and served as a co-chair of conferences on Computer-Aided Verification (CAV), Formal Methods in Computer Aided Design (FMCAD), Workshop on Synthesis (SYNT), and Verification, Model Checking, and Abstract Interpretation (VMCAI). At EPFL he teaches courses on functional and parallel programming, compilers, and verification. He has co-taught the MOOC "Parallel Programming" that was visited by over 100'000 learners and completed by thousands of students from all over the world.
André Schiper
André Schiper graduated in Physics from the ETHZ in Zurich in 1973 and received the PhD degree in Computer Science from EPFL in 1980. He has been a professor of computer science at EPFL since 1985, leading the Distributed Systems Laboratory. During the academic year 1992-1993 he was on sabbatical leave at the University of Cornell, Ithaca, New York (working with Ken Birman and Aleta Ricciardi), and in 2004-2005 at the Ecole Polytechnique in Palaiseau, France (working with Bernadette Charron-Bost). His research interests are in the area of dependable distributed systems, middleware support for dependable systems, replication techniques (including for database systems), group communication, distributed transactions, and MANETs (mobile ad-hoc networks).
Prof. Schiper is member of the editorial boards of
Distributed Computing (DC), Springer Verlag - ACM,
Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing (TDSC), IEEE,
International Journal of Security and Networks (Inderscience).
Daniel Thalmann
Prof. Daniel Thalmann is Honorary Professor at EPFL and Director of Research development at MIRALab Sarl. He has been Visiting Professor at The Institute for Media Innovation (Nanyang Technological University, Singapore) from 2009 to 2017. He is a pioneer in research on Virtual Humans. His current research interests include Real-time Virtual Humans in Virtual Reality, crowd simulation, and 3D Interaction. Daniel Thalmann has been the Founder of The Virtual Reality Lab (VRlab) at EPFL, Switzerland, Professor at The University of Montreal and Visiting Professor/ Researcher at CERN, University of Nebraska, University of Tokyo, and National University of Singapore. Until October 2010, he was the President of the Swiss Association of Research in Information Technology and one Director of the European Research Consortium in Informatics and Mathematics (ERCIM). He is coeditor-in-chief of the Journal of Computer Animation and Virtual Worlds, and member of the editorial board of 6 other journals. Daniel Thalmann was member of numerous Program Committees, Program Chair and CoChair of several conferences including IEEE VR, ACM VRST, and ACM VRCAI. Daniel Thalmann has published more than 500 papers in Graphics, Animation, and Virtual Reality. He is coeditor of 30 books, and coauthor of several books including 'Crowd Simulation' (second edition 2012) and 'Stepping Into Virtual Reality' (2007), published by Springer. He received his PhD in Computer Science in 1977 from the University of Geneva and an Honorary Doctorate (Honoris Causa) from University Paul- Sabatier in Toulouse, France, in 2003. He also received the Eurographics Distinguished Career Award in 2010 and the 2012 Canadian Human Computer Communications Society Achievement Award. Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Thalmann
Karl Aberer
Karl Aberer received his PhD in mathematics in 1991 from the ETH Zürich. From 1991 to 1992 he was postdoctoral fellow at the International Computer Science Institute (ICSI) at the University of California, Berkeley. In 1992, he joined the Integrated Publication and Information Systems institute (IPSI) of GMD in Germany, where he was leading the research division Open Adaptive Information Management Systems. In 2000 he joined EPFL as full professor. Since 2005 he is the director of the Swiss National Research Center for Mobile Information and Communication Systems (
NCCR-MICS, www.mics.ch
). He is member of the editorial boards of VLDB Journal, ACM Transaction on Autonomous and Adaptive Systems and World Wide Web Journal. He has been consulting for the Swiss government in research and science policy as a member of the Swiss Research and Technology Council (
SWTR
) from 2003 - 2011.
Rachid Guerraoui
Rachid Guerraoui has been affiliated with Ecole des Mines of Paris, the Commissariat à l'Energie Atomique of Saclay, Hewlett Packard Laboratories and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He has worked in a variety of aspects of distributed computing, including distributed algorithms and distributed programming languages. He is most well known for his work on (e-)Transactions, epidemic information dissemination and indulgent algorithms.
He co-authored a book on Transactional Systems (Hermes) and a book on reliable distributed programming (Springer). He was appointed program chair of ECOOP 1999, ACM Middleware 2001, IEEE SRDS 2002, DISC 2004 and ACM PODC 2010.
His publications are available at http://lpdwww.epfl.ch/rachid/papers/generalPublis.html
Alain Wegmann
Alain Wegmann joined EPFL in 1996. His interests are in techniques to better align business and IT. He developed, with his group and partners, the SEAM methods: SEAM for business (strategic thinking), SEAM for enterprise architecture (business/IT alignment) and SEAM for software (IT). The originality of SEAM is in the integration of generic systems thinking principles into discipline-specific methods. This integration has three benefits: (1) the possibility to relate the different disciplines (by having common systemic principles); (2) the capability to leverage on discipline-specific knowledge (by using the vocabulary and the heuristics of each discipline) and (3) to be more efficient in solving problems (by benefiting from the problem solving techniques developed in systems thinking). SEAM is currently applied in master courses and consulting. Consulting is done for start-ups developing their business and technology strategies and for large companies having service-oriented architecture projects.
Prior to joining EPFL, Alain Wegmann worked for 14 years with Logitech in software development/engineering management (Switzerland, Taiwan, US), manufacturing (Taiwan) and marketing (US). When he left Logitech, Alain Wegmann was engineering vice-president and marketing director for large accounts.