Heinz Hügli is professor emeritus at Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL). He was a research director and associate professor at the Institute of Microtechnology, University of Neuchâtel, Switzerland, where he teached and headed the Pattern Recognition Laboratory (PARLAB). From 1988 to 2008, this lab was active in computer vision and pattern recognition with emphasis on early vision processing, industrial inspection, 3D object modeling and recognition.
Heinz Hügli received the Diploma in Electrical Engineering and Ph.D. degree from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (EPFZ). He spent five year with the Image processing research group at EPFZ and later two years with the Medical Imaging Science Group, University of Southern California. In 1982 he joined the University of Neuchâtel were he first conducted speech recognition activities and then founded the PARLAB. He teached at the University of Neuchâtel, EPFL and University of Bern. Author of more than 150 scientific publications, he has chaired international conferences, was a member of several scientific societies, and participated in several conference program committees.
Alexandre Alahi is currently an Assistant Professor at EPFL. He spent five years at Stanford University as a Post-doc and Research Scientist after obtaining his Ph.D. from EPFL. His research enables machines to perceive the world and make decisions in the context of transportation problems and smart environments. He has worked on the theoretical challenges and practical applications of socially-aware Artificial Intelligence, i.e., systems equipped with perception and social intelligence. He was awarded the Swiss NSF early and advanced researcher grants for his work on predicting human social behavior. He won the CVPR Open Source Award (2012) for his work on Retina-inspired image descriptors, and the ICDSC Challenge Prize (2009) for his sparsity-driven algorithm that has tracked more than 100 million pedestrians to date. His research has been covered internationally by BBC, abc, PBS, Euronews, Wall street journal, and other national news outlets around the world. Alexandre has also co-founded multiple startups such as Visiosafe, and won several startup competitions. He was elected as one of the Top 20 Swiss Venture leaders in 2010.
Fadi is a strategic management professional with over 20 years of experience. His work concentrates on advising companies and educational institutes on how to adapt to the 21st century complexity and how to overcome its disruptive nature by adopting innovative processes and technologies. Throughout his career, he assumed roles in academia, R&D, product management, marketing and business development, project management, operations and strategic management.
For the last three years, he has been developing advisory solutions for strategic management, where he has advised several CEO’s on how to strategically transform, navigate disruption, and succeed in the future through i) adopting fit-for-purpose strategies and ii) changing the mindsets on how strategic change should be done and by whom.
In addition to his PhD at the EPFL in Engineering (ENAC/TOPO) in 2006, Fadi holds an MBA (2019) at Strathclyde Business School (Glasgow, UK) with specialization in Strategic Management, two master engineering degrees from Greece (1999) and Canada (2002), an Executive Development at INSEAD (2017), and Construction Management at Columbia University (2017).
