Concept
Steiner tree problem
Related people (28)
Martin Vetterli
Martin 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.
Thomas Liebling
Thomas M. Liebling (http://roso.epfl.ch) is Mathematics Professor Emeritus at EPFL (Lausanne), where he taught from 1980 to 2008 and directed the OR group ROSO.
He served on the jury of 112 PhD and habilitation theses, 39 as director. He further supervised 150 MS theses and 350 term projects, many of which in collaboration with industry and private and public services. He published over 200 refereed papers, books, and book chapters.
Previous appointments were with ETHZ, and RPI; as visiting professor with Cornell, ELTE-Budapest, MIT, PUC-Rio, and Stanford.
He received his education from ETH Zurich:
MS in EE (1966, automatic control),
PhD in operations research (1969; awarded the ETH prize and medal).
Mathematics habilitation (1973) with a pioneering probabilistic study on the number of iterations of the simplex method.
Postdoctoral fellowship (1970/71) Stanford University with G.B. Dantzig
He holds the Science Prize of the German OR Society, is a member of the Swiss Academy of Engineering Sciences and the Scientific Council of ZIB, Berlin.
He received a honorary degree from the Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos, Lima and the Medal of Merit from EPN Escuela Politécnica Nacional, Quito.
Editorial activities: DE (Optimization and Networks) of Management Science, AE of Operations Research, OR-letters, OR-Spectrum, EJOR, Discrete Applied Optimization, and Math. Programming, recurring guest-editor of MPB and DAM.
He is Editor in Chief of the MOS-SIAM book series on optimization.
He is a founding organizer of the Aussois Workshops in Combinatorial Optimization, and member of the steering committee of LAGOS (Latin American Graphs, Optimizstion Symposium) chaired the MPS Publications Committee, Tucker Prize Committee, and presently chairs its Symposium Advisory Committee. He organized ISMP 1997 at EPFL, with nearly 1500 participants from 63 countries, the largest to date. He has chaired the Conference of Department Chairmen (a position comparable to a provost), the Computer Commission (responsible for the introduction at EPFL of the first Swiss supercomputer), and further chaired the Research Commission over 6 years, he created the Doctoral Award and was its first Jury chair. He belonged to the Board of Trustees of the Swiss National Science Foundation .
Much of his research lies at the interface with other disciplines (physics, life sciences, materials science, management, engineering, logistics), focusing on complex systems modeling, simulation, and optimization.
His present research interests are in algorithmic game theory and complex particle system modeling and simulation using paradigms from mathematical programming, discrete geometry and probability.
Jean-Pierre Hubaux
Jean-Pierre Hubaux is a full professor at EPFL and head of the Laboratory for Data Security. Through his research, he contributes to laying the foundations and developing the tools for protecting privacy in today’s hyper-connected world. He has pioneered the areas of privacy and security in mobile/wireless networks and in personalized health. He is the academic director of the Center for Digital Trust (C4DT). He leads the Data Protection in Personalized Health (DPPH) project funded by the ETH Council and is a co-chair of the Data Security Work Stream of the Global Alliance for Genomics and Health (GA4GH). From 2008 to 2019 he was one of the seven commissioners of the Swiss FCC. He is a Fellow of both IEEE (2008) and ACM (2010). Recent awards: two of his papers obtained distinctions at the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy in 2015 and 2018. He is among the most cited researchers in privacy protection and in information security. Spoken languages: French, English, German, Italian
Michel Bierlaire
Born 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.
Friedrich Eisenbrand
Friedrich Eisenbrand's main research interests lie in the field of discrete optimization, in particular in algorithms and complexity, integer programming, geometry of numbers, and applied optimization. He is best known for his work on efficient algorithms for integer programming in fixed dimension and the theory of cutting planes, which are an important tool to solve large scale industrial optimization problems in practice.
Before joining EPFL in March 2008, Friedrich Eisenbrand was a full professor of mathematics at the University of Paderborn. Friedrich received the Heinz Maier-Leibnitz award of the German Research Foundation (DFG) in 2004 and the Otto Hahn medal of the Max Planck Society in 2001.
Martin Hasler
After a PhD and a postdoc in theoretical physics, Martin Hasler has pursued reasearch in electrical circuit and filter theory. His current interests are the applications of nonlinear dynamics in engineering and biology. In particular, he is interested in information processing in biological and technological networks. He is most well-known for his work in communications using chaos and in synchronization of networks of dynamical systems.
He joined EPFL in 1974, became a titular professor in 1984 and a full professor in 1998. In 2002, he was acting Dean of the School of Computer and Communication Sciences. He was elected Fellow of the IEEE in 1993. He was the general chair of ISCAS 2000 in Geneva. He was Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions in Circuits and Systems from 1991 to 1993 and Editor-in-Chief from 1993 to 1995. He was elected vice-president for Technical Activities of the IEEE Circuits and Systems Society from 2002 to 2005. He is a member of the Research Council of the Swiss National Science Foundation.
Volkan Cevher
Volkan 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.