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.
Touradj EbrahimiTouradj EBRAHIMI received his M.Sc. and Ph.D., both in Electrical Engineering, from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL), Lausanne, Switzerland, in 1989 and 1992 respectively. In 1993, he was a research engineer at the Corporate Research Laboratories of Sony Corporation in Tokyo, where he conducted research on advanced video compression techniques for storage applications. In 1994, he served as a research consultant at AT&T Bell Laboratories working on very low bitrate video coding. He is currently Professor at EPFL heading its Multimedia Signal Processing Group. He is also the Convenor of JPEG standardization Committee. He was also adjunct Professor with the Center of Quantifiable Quality of Service at Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU)from 2008 to 2012.
Prof. Ebrahimi has been the recipient of various distinctions and awards, such as the IEEE and Swiss national ASE award, the SNF-PROFILE grant for advanced researchers, Four ISO-Certificates for key contributions to MPEG-4 and JPEG 2000, and the best paper award of IEEE Trans. on Consumer Electronics . He became a Fellow of the international society for optical engineering (SPIE) in 2003. Prof. Ebrahimi has initiated more than two dozen National, European and International cooperation projects with leading companies and research institutes around the world. He is a co-founder of Genista SA, a high-tech start-up company in the field of multimedia quality metrics. In 2002, he founded Emitall SA, start-up active in the area of media security and surveillance. In 2005, he founded EMITALL Surveillance SA, a start-up active in the field of privacy and protection. He is or has been associate Editor with various IEEE, SPIE, and EURASIP journals, such as IEEE Signal Processing Magazine, IEEE Trans. on Image Processing, IEEE Trans. on Multimedia, EURASIP Image Communication Journal, EURASIP Journal of Applied Signal Processing, SPIE Optical Engineering Magazine. Prof. Ebrahimi is a member of Scientific Advisory Board of various start-up and established companies in the general field of Information Technology. He has served as Scientific Expert and Evaluator for Research Funding Agencies such as those of European Commission, The Greek Ministry of Development, The Austrian National Foundation for Scientific Research, The Portuguese Science Foundation, as well as a number of Venture Capital Companies active in the field of Information Technologies and Communication Systems. His research interests include still, moving, and 3D image processing and coding, visual information security (rights protection, watermarking, authentication, data integrity, steganography), new media, and human computer interfaces (smart vision, brain computer interface).
He is the author or the co-author of more than 200 research publications, and holds 14 patents. Prof. Ebrahimi is a member of IEEE, SPIE, ACM and IS&T.
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http://mmspl.epfl.ch Ali H. SayedAli H. Sayed is Dean of Engineering at EPFL, Switzerland, where he also leads the Adaptive Systems Laboratory. He has also served as Distinguished Professor and Chairman of Electrical Engineering at UCLA. He is recognized as a Highly Cited Researcher and is a member of the US National Academy of Engineering. He is also a member of the World Academy of Sciences and served as President of the IEEE Signal Processing Society during 2018 and 2019.
Dr. Sayed is an author/co-author of over 570 scholarly publications and six books. His research involves several areas
including adaptation and learning theories, data and network sciences, statistical inference, and multiagent systems.
His work has been recognized with several major awards including the 2022 IEEE Fourier Award, the 2020 Norbert Wiener Society Award and the 2015 Education Award from the IEEE Signal Processing Society, the 2014 Papoulis Award from the European Association for Signal Processing, the 2013 Meritorious Service Award and the 2012 Technical Achievement Award from the IEEE Signal Processing Society, the 2005 Terman Award from the American Society for Engineering Education, the 2005 Distinguished Lecturer from the IEEE Signal Processing Society, the 2003 Kuwait Prize, and the 1996 IEEE Donald G. Fink Prize. His publications have been awarded several Best Paper Awards from the IEEE (2002, 2005, 2012, 2014) and EURASIP (2015). He is a Fellow of IEEE, EURASIP, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS); the publisher of the journal Science.
Michael Christoph GastparMichael Gastpar is a (full) Professor at EPFL. From 2003 to 2011, he was a professor at the University of California at Berkeley, earning his tenure in 2008.
He received his Dipl. El.-Ing. degree from ETH Zürich, Switzerland, in 1997 and his MS degree from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, IL, USA, in 1999. He defended his doctoral thesis at EPFL on Santa Claus day, 2002. He was also a (full) Professor at Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands.
His research interests are in network information theory and related coding and signal processing techniques, with applications to sensor networks and neuroscience.
He is a Fellow of the IEEE. He is the co-recipient of the 2013 Communications Society & Information Theory Society Joint Paper Award. He was an Information Theory Society Distinguished Lecturer (2009-2011). He won an ERC Starting Grant in 2010, an Okawa Foundation Research Grant in 2008, an NSF CAREER award in 2004, and the 2002 EPFL Best Thesis Award. He has served as an Associate Editor for Shannon Theory for the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory (2008-11), and as Technical Program Committee Co-Chair for the 2010 International Symposium on Information Theory, Austin, TX.
