Concept
Evolution
Related people (43)
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
Denis Duboule
Denis Duboule is born in 1955 and is both swiss and french national. He studied biology at the university of Geneva, where he obtained a PhD in mammalian embryology in 1984. He then spent 10 years abroad, first as a group leader in the medical faculty in Strasbourg (France), then at the European Laboratory for Molecular Biology (EMBL) in Germany. In 1993, he was appointed full professor at the university of Geneva, where he chairs the department of Genetics and Evolution ever since 1997. In 2001, he chaired the national center of research Frontiers in Genetics and in 2012 the division III of the SNSF. In 2006, he was appointed full professor at the federal institute of technology (EPFL) in Lausanne, where he leads the laboratory of Developmental Genomics (UpDUB).
His research activities are in the fields of embryology, genetics and developmental genomics of mammals, in an evolutionnary context. In particular, his laboratory has been closely associated with the structural and functional studies of mammalian Hox genes, by using mouse molecular genetic approaches. Duboule is also active in the communication of science, is member of the Academia Europea as well as of several academies in Switzerland, France and the Netherland. He is a foreign member of the Royal Society (UK) and of the National Academy of Sciences USA. He has received various scientific prizes and awards, amongst which the Marcel Benoist Prize, the Louis-Jeantet prize for medicine in 1998 or the international INSERM prize in 2010 (see also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denis_Duboule).
Bernard Moret
Bernard M.E. Moret was born in Vevey, Switzerland, received baccalauréats in Latin-Greek and Latin-Mathematics, then did a Diploma in Electrical Engineering at EPFL. After working for 2 years for Omega and Swiss Timing on the development of real-time OS for sports applications, he left for the US. He received his PhD in Electrical Engineering from the U. of Tennessee in 1980 and joined the Department of Computer Science at the University of New Mexico (UNM) that fall. He served as Chairman of the department from 1991 till 1993 and eventually retired in summer 2006 to join the School of Computer and Communication Sciences at EPFL. (You can read about his work at UNM on his (archived) personal and laboratory web pages at UNM.) He was appointed group leader for phylogenetics at the Swiss Institute for Bioinformatics (SIB). From 2009 until his retirement, he was also in charge of the BS and MS programs in Computer Science and Associate Dean for Education. He founded the ACM Journal of Experimental Algorithmics (JEA) and served as its Editor-in-Chief for 7 years; he also helped found the IEEE/ACM Transactions on Computational Biology and Bioinformatics (TCBB), where he served as Associate Editor until 2008. He founded the annual Workshop on Algorithms in Bioinformatics (WABI) and chairs its steering committee, and he serves on the steering committee of the Workshop on Algorithm Engineering and Experiments (ALENEX). Until summer 2008, he chaired the Biodata Management and Analysis (BDMA) study section of the US National Institutes of Health (NIH); now he is a charter member of the NIH College of Reviewers. He led a team of over 50 biologists, computer scientists, and mathematicians in the CIPRES (Cyber Infrastructure for Phylogenetic Research) project, funded by the US National Science Foundation (NSF) for US$ 12 million over 5 years. He has published nearly 150 papers in computational biology, under funding from the US NSF, the Alfred P. Sloan foundation, the IBM Corporation, the US NIH, the Swiss NSF, and SystemsX.ch. He is a Fellow of the ISCB (International Society for Computational Biology). His Erdös number is 2 and (as of 2020) his h-index is 48.
Stewart Cole
Professor Stewart Cole is an international authority in bacterial molecular-genetics and genomics. He has made outstanding contributions in several fields including: bacterial anaerobic electron transport; genome analysis of retroviruses and papillomaviruses; antibiotic resistance mechanisms; and the molecular microbiology of toxigenic clostridia. His studies on isoniazid and multidrug resistance in Mycobacterium tuberculosis, together with his pioneering work on the pathogenicity, evolution and genomics of the tubercle and leprosy bacilli, have made him an undisputed leader in the field of mycobacterial research. The findings of his research are of direct relevance to public health and disease-control in both the developing world and the industrialised nations. He has published over 250 scientific papers and review articles, and holds many patents.
Didier Trono
After obtaining an M.D. from the University of Geneva and completing a clinical training in pathology, internal medicine and infectious diseases in Geneva and at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, Didier Trono embarked in a scientific career at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research of MIT. In 1990, he joined the faculty of the Salk Institute for Biological Studies to launch a center for AIDS research. He moved back to Europe seven years later, before taking the reins of the newly created EPFL School of Life Sciences, which he directed from 2004 to 2012. He is now actively engaged in the efforts of Switzerland to integrate new technologies in the fields of precision medicine and personalized health.
Anton Schleiss
Prof. Dr. Anton J. Schleiss graduated in Civil Engineering from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich, Switzerland, in 1978. After joining the Laboratory of Hydraulic, Hydrology and Glaciology at ETH as a research associate and senior assistant, he obtained a Doctorate of Technical Sciences on the topic of pressure tunnel design in 1986. After that he worked for 11 years for Electrowatt Engineering Ltd. (now Pöyry) in Zurich and was involved in the design of many hydropower projects around the world as an expert on hydraulic engineering and underground waterways. Until 1996 he was Head of the Hydraulic Structures Section in the Hydropower Department at Electrowatt. In 1997, he was nominated full professor and became Director of the Laboratory of Hydraulic Constructions (LCH) in the Civil Engineering Department of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL). The LCH activities comprise education, research and services in the field of both fundamental and applied hydraulics and design of hydraulic structures and schemes. The research focuses on the interaction between water, sediment-rock, air and hydraulic structures as well as associated environmental issues and involves both numerical and physical modeling of water infrastructures. In May 2018, he became Honorary Professor at EPFL. More than 50 PhD and Postdoc research projects have been carried out under his guidance. From 1999 to 2009 he was Director of the Master of Advanced Studies (MAS) in Water Resources Management and Hydraulic Engineering held in Lausanne in collaboration with ETH Zurich and the universities of Innsbruck (Austria), Munich (Germany), Grenoble (France) and Liège (Belgium). From 2006 to 2012 he was the Head of the Civil Engineering program of EPFL and chairman of the Swiss Committee on Dams (SwissCOLD). In 2006, he obtained the ASCE Karl Emil Hilgard Hydraulic Price as well as the J. C. Stevens Award. He was listed in 2011 among the 20 international personalities that “have made the biggest difference to the sector Water Power & Dam Construction over the last 10 years”. Between 2014 and 2017 he was Council member of International Association for Hydro-Environment Engineering and Research (IAHR) and he was chair of the Europe Regional Division of IAHR until 2016. For his outstanding contributions to advance the art and science of hydraulic structures engineering he obtained in 2015 the ASCE-EWRI Hydraulic Structures Medal. The French Hydro Society (SHF) awarded him with the Grand Prix SHF 2018. After having served as vice-president between 2012 and 2015 he was president of the International Commission on Large Dams (ICOLD) from 2015 to 2018. On behalf of ICOLD he his the coordinator of the EU Horizon 2020 project "Hydropower Europe". With more than 40 years of experience he is regularly involved as a consultant and expert in large water infrastructures projects including hydropower and dams all over the world. Awards (besides those mentioned above): ASCE-Journal of Hydraulic Engineering Outstanding Reviewer Recognition 2013 ASCE-EWRI-Journal of Hydraulic Engineering 2014 Best Technical Note
Francesco Mondada
Dr. Mondada received his M.Sc. in micro-engineering in 1991 and his Doctoral degree in 1997 at EPFL. During his thesis he co-founded the company K-Team, being both CEO and president of the company for about 5 years. He is one of the three main developers of the Khepera robot, considered as a standard in bio-inspired robotics and used by more than 1,000 universities and research centers worldwide. Fully back in research in 2000 and after a short period at CALTECH, he participated to the SWARM-BOTS project as the main developer of the s-bot robot platform, which was ranked on position 39 in the list of The 50 Best Robots Ever (fiction or real) by the Wired Journal in 2006. The SWARM-BOTS project was selected as FET-IST success story by the EU commission. He is author of more than 100 papers in the field of bio-inspired robotics and system level robot design. He is co-editor of several international conference proceedings. In November 2005 he received the EPFL Latsis University prize for his contributions to bio-inspired robotics. In 2011 he received the "Crédit Suisse Award for Best Teaching" from EPFL and in 2012 the "polysphère" award from the students as best teacher in the school of engineering. His interests include the development of innovative mechatronic solutions for mobile and modular robots, the creation of know-how for future embedded applications, and making robot platforms more accessible for education, research, and industrial development.
Jean-François Molinari
Professor J.F. Molinari is the director of the Computational Solid Mechanics Laboratory (http://lsms.epfl.ch) at EPFL, Switzerland. He holds an appointment in the Civil Engineering institute, which he directed from 2013 to 2017, and a joint appointment in the Materials Science institute. He started his tenure at EPFL in 2007, and was promoted to Full Professor in 2012. He is currently an elected member of the Research Council of the Swiss National Science Foundation in Division 2 (Mathematics, Natural and Engineering Sciences), and co editor in chief of the journal Mechanics of Materials. J.F. Molinari graduated from Caltech, USA, in 2001, with a M.S. and Ph.D. in Aeronautics. He held professorships in several countries besides Switzerland, including the United States with a position in Mechanical Engineering at the Johns Hopkins University (2000-2006), and France at Ecole Normale Supérieure Cachan in Mechanics (2005-2007), as well as a Teaching Associate position at the Ecole Polytechnique de Paris (2006-2009). The work conducted by Prof. Molinari and his collaborators takes place at the frontier between traditional disciplines and covers several length scales from atomistic to macroscopic scales. Over the years, Professor Molinari and his group have been developing novel multiscale approaches for a seamless coupling across scales. The activities of the laboratory span the domains of damage mechanics of materials and structures, nano- and microstructural mechanical properties, and tribology.