Florence Graezer BideauSenior Lecturer and Senior Scientist at the College of Humanities and at the School of Architecture, EPFLVisiting Professor at the Department of Architecture and Design, Politecnico di Torino PhD in History and Civilization (EHESS, Paris) Director of the Minor in Area and Cultural Studies (MACS) between 2012 and 2016Member of the Research group Heritage, culture and the cityAssociated researcher at the China Room Research Group and South China-Torino Collaboration Lab, Politecnico di Torino Associate member of the Laboratoire d’anthropologie culturelle et sociale (LACS), UNIL Member of the EDAR committee (Doctoral Program Architecture and Sciences of the City) at the School of Architecture, Civil and Environment Engineering in EPFL Florence Graezer Bideau trained as an anthropologist and a sinologist, and received her PhD in History and Civilization in 2005. Before joining the Centre for Area and Cultural Studies (CACS) at EPFL in 2010, she was a lecturer in anthropology at the University of Lausanne, where she taught courses in cultural theory and fieldwork methodology. She is Senior Lecturer and Senior Scientist at the College of Humanities where she teaches area studies, anthropology of China, critical heritage studies and urban studies. She has been acting as Director of the Minor in Area and Cultural Studies between 2012 and 2016 and she is currently a member of the EDAR committee (Doctoral Program Architecture and Sciences of the City) at the School of Architecture, Civil and Environment Engineering in EPFL. Since 2015, Florence has also been Visiting Professor at the Department of Architecture and Design, Politecnico di Torino, Italy. Her fields of expertise include anthropology of China, urban sociology, modes of sociability and governmentality. Florence’s research is on the relation between culture and power (making of cultural policy in China; emergence of maker movement (makerspaces) and politics of innovation in China), heritage issues (process of heritagization and multiculturalism in Malaysia and Singapore; implementation of the UNESCO Convention for Safeguarding Intangible Cultural Heritage in Switzerland; historic urban landscape in heritage policy of Beijing, Rome and Mexico City), and the making of the city (informal resistances toward the violence of urbanism in Caracas, Chennai and Guangzhou; uses of public spaces in Chinese new towns).
Alain DufauxAfter obtaining a diploma of electrical engineer in 1994 at EPFL (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Lausanne, Switzerland), Alain Dufaux has joined the Institute of Microtechnology (IMT) of the University of Neuchâtel, in the team of Professor Pellandini (Electronics and Signal Processing Laboratory). His research activities were first dedicated to speech compression and recognition, and then, he specialized in audio processing. His PhD thesis, presented in 2001, concerned detection and recognition of impulsive sound signals. Still in 2001, Alain Dufaux participated to the Launch of the company Dspfactory SA in Marin, emerged from Dspfactory Ltd. in Canada. Active in the field of ultra-low-power DSP processors for applications like hearing aids, consumer audio or medical devices, this company was acquired in 2004 by the worldwide company AMI Semiconductor. During 6 years, Alain occupied several positions: - Head of signal processing group in the Advanced Application department; - Senior member of the Applied DSP and embedded software group in Canada, developing low-power audio algorithms; - Signal processing specialist in the european customer support team, especially active in trainings and tutorials dedicated to low-delay multirate filterbanks and low-power signal processing techniques for hearing aids. Alain was back at EPFL in November 2006, at first as head of the Vision & Embedded DSP Group in the Laboratory of Microengineering for Manufacturing (LPM). In this role, most of the effort was dedicated to team management, definition of research projects or partnerships with industries, project follow-up, and support or co-direction of the PhD thesis of the lab. In October 2008, Alain also became responsible for the management of the Micro-assembly group of the LPM, and was enrolled as co-lecturer for the course "Méthodes de Production". In Spring 2011, Alain Dufaux has joined the MetaMedia Center (MMC) recently launched by the Vice-Presidence for Innovation and Valorization (VPIV). Acting as project manager, his activity is split between the operational tasks of the Montreux Jazz Digital Project, and the numerous innovation projects initiated by the MMC in partnership with the labs of EPFL working around acoustics, signal processing or multimedia. Since June 2014, Alain is the operation & development director of the Metamedia Center.
