Concept
Disaster
Related people (11)
Dario Floreano
Prof. Dario Floreano is director of the Laboratory of Intelligent Systems at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL). Since 2010, he is the founding director of the Swiss National Center of Competence in Robotics, a research program that brings together more than 20 labs across Switzerland. Prof. Floreano holds an M.A. in Vision, an M.S. in Neural Computation, and a PhD in Robotics. He has held research positions at Sony Computer Science Laboratory, at Caltech/JPL, and at Harvard University. His main research interests are Robotics and A.I. at the convergence of biology and engineering. Prof. Floreano made pioneering contributions to the fields of evolutionary robotics, aerial robotics, and soft robotics. He served in numerous advisory boards and committees, including the Future and Emerging Technologies division of the European Commission, the World Economic Forum Agenda Council, the International Society of Artificial Life, the International Neural Network Society, and in the editorial committee of several scientific journals. In addition, he helped spinning off two drone companies (senseFly.com and Flyability.com) and a non-for-profit portal on robotics and A.I. (RoboHub.org). Books
Manuale sulle Reti Neurali, il Mulino (in Italian), 1996 (first edition), 2006 (second edition)Evolutionary Robotics, MIT Press, 2000
Bio-Inspired Artificial Intelligence, MIT Press, 2008
Flying Insects and Robots, Springer Verlag, 2010
Anthony Christopher Davison
Anthony Davison has published on a wide range of topics in statistical theory and methods, and on environmental, biological and financial applications. His main research interests are statistics of extremes, likelihood asymptotics, bootstrap and other resampling methods, and statistical modelling, with a particular focus on the first currently. Statistics of extremes concerns rare events such as storms, high winds and tides, extreme pollution episodes, sporting records, and the like. The subject has a long history, but under the impact of engineering and environmental problems has been an area of intense development in the past 20 years. Davison''s PhD work was in this area, in a project joint between the Departments of Mathematics and Mechanical Engineering at Imperial College, with the aim of modelling potential high exposures to radioactivity due to releases from nuclear installations. The key tools developed, joint with Richard Smith, were regression models for exceedances over high thresholds, which generalized earlier work by hydrologists, and formed the basis of some important later developments. This has led to an ongoing interest in extremes, and in particular their application to environmental and financial data. A major current interest is the development of suitable methods for modelling rare spatio-temporal events, particularly but not only in the context of climate change. Likelihood asymptotics too have undergone very substantial development since 1980. Key tools here have been saddlepoint and related approximations, which can give remarkably accurate approximate distribution and density functions even for very small sample sizes. These approximations can be used for wide classes of parametric models, but also for certain bootstrap and resampling problems. The literature on these methods can seem arcane, but they are potentially widely applicable, and Davison wrote a book joint with Nancy Reid and Alessandra Brazzale intended to promote their use in applications. Bootstrap methods are now used in many areas of application, where they can provide a researcher with accurate inferences tailor-made to the data available, rather than relying on large-sample or other approximations of doubtful validity. The key idea is to replace analytical calculations of biases, variances, confidence and prediction intervals, and other measures of uncertainty with computer simulation from a suitable statistical model. In a nonparametric situation this model consists of the data themselves, and the simulation simply involves resampling from the existing data, while in a parametric case it involves simulation from a suitable parametric model. There is a wide range of possibilities between these extremes, and the book by Davison and Hinkley explores these for many data examples, with the aim of showing how and when resampling methods succeed and why they can fail. He was Editor of Biometrika (2008-2017), Joint Editor of Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, series B (2000-2003), editor of the IMS Lecture Notes Monograph Series (2007), Associate Editor of Biometrika (1987-1999), and Associate Editor of the Brazilian Journal of Probability and Statistics (1987 2006). Currently he on the editorial board of Annual Reviews of Statistics and its Applications. He has served on committees of Royal Statistical Society and of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics. He is an elected Fellow of the American Statistical Assocation and of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, an elected member of the International Statistical Institute, and a Chartered Statistician. In 2009 he was awarded a laurea honoris causa in Statistical Science by the University of Padova, in 2011 he held a Francqui Chair at Hasselt University, and in 2012 he was Mitchell Lecturer at the University of Glasgow. In 2015 he received the Guy Medal in Silver of the Royal Statistical Society and in 2018 was a Medallion Lecturer of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics.
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.
Silvia Hostettler
Short Profile
PhD Environmental Science
20 years of experience in global sustainability challenges
Professional Activities
09/2012–05/2019 Cooperation & Development Center, EPFL Deputy Director
Acting Director of CODEV from February to September 2014.
Leading research projects in disaster risk reduction.
Lecturer in Development Engineering.
Directing International Conference on Technologies for Development.
02/2008–08/2012 swissnex India Executive Director
Establishing research collaboration between India and Switzerland.
Building networks and organising 58 events with research organisations.
Developing projects in science and technology, education and innovation.
Managing swissnex India team (6 people) in Bangalore, India.
05/2001–01/2007 EPFL, Switzerland Researcher
Research and publication of a PhD dissertation on land use changes and international migration.
Developed research projects in Latin America and the Caribbean in collaboration with Swiss and Southern partner institutions.
05/2001–12/2001 NCCR North-South, University of Bern Consultant
Responsible for backstopping workshops in Ethiopia, Kenya, Cuba, Bolivia, Nepal and Vietnam.
Ensured continuation of learning process and production of final report.
07/2001–12/2001 Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) Researcher
Co-organised conference: “Research Partnerships for Sustainable Development: Approaches and Experiences in Latin America” in Cartagena, Colombia.
04/2001–12/2001 IUCN – The World Conservation Union Programme Assistant
Developed project proposals with local organisations in China for IUCN Northeast Asia programme.
01/2000–03/2001 IUCN – The World Conservation Programme Coordinator Cloud Forest Initiative
Developed project proposals with IUCN Regional Offices in Latin America, Africa and Asia and presented projects to donor agencies.
Established networks with international partners (World Conservation Monitoring Centre, WWF, UNESCO) to prepare joint activities for cloud forest conservation.
09/1996–01/1997 State Secretariat for Education and Research
Co-organised “Research and Technology Day” in Stockholm, Sweden
Research and Working Experience Abroad
India | Executive Director, swissnex India | (2008-2012)Mexico | Fieldwork for PhD research | (9 months, 2002-2004)Burkina Faso | Fieldwork for CAS research | (6 months, 1998-1999)Ghana | Fieldwork for BSc research | (3 months, 1996)London | Internship at Greenpeace | (6 months, 1994)Colombia | Exchange programme at college level in Bogota | (1987)
Management Skills
Planning and leading the creation of short- and long-term visionsStrategic programme planningLeading Teams Professional Affiliations
Member of the Editorial Board, Journal of Development Engineering (2015-
Swiss Commission for Research Partnerships with Developing Countries (KFPE) (2013-
Conseil Suisse de Recherches Scientifiques (CSRS) (2017-2019)
Professional Women’s Group Bangalore (2009-2012)