Volkan Cevher received the B.Sc. (valedictorian) in electrical engineering from Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey, in 1999 and the Ph.D. in electrical and computer engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, GA in 2005. He was a Research Scientist with the University of Maryland, College Park from 2006-2007 and also with Rice University in Houston, TX, from 2008-2009. Currently, he is an Associate Professor at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne and a Faculty Fellow in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at Rice University. His research interests include machine learning, signal processing theory, optimization theory and methods, and information theory. Dr. Cevher is an ELLIS fellow and was the recipient of the Google Faculty Research award in 2018, the IEEE Signal Processing Society Best Paper Award in 2016, a Best Paper Award at CAMSAP in 2015, a Best Paper Award at SPARS in 2009, and an ERC CG in 2016 as well as an ERC StG in 2011.
I received my BSc. in telecommunications engineering (Valedictorian) from Universidad Politecnica de Madrid (UPM), Spain, in June 2015, and my MSc. in electrical engineering (Best Graduate, cum laude) from Delft University of Technology (TU Delft), The Netherlands, in August 2018. During my studies, I held positions at the Microwaves and Radar Group of UPM during 2015-2016 and at Philips Healthcare Research in Hamburg (Germany) during summer 2017. I am now working towards my PhD. thesis at the Signal Processing Laboratory 4 under the supervision of Prof. Pascal Frossard. My current research focuses on understanding deep learning by studying the complex interactions between datasets, architectures and optimization. In my work, I am providing a novel framework to design better and more reliable neural networks that exploit prior knowledge about the world. I am the recipient of a National Award for Excellence in Academic Performance from the Ministry of Education of Spain, a la Caixa Postgraduate Fellowship, and the Best Graduate award both at UPM and TU Delft.
Nicolas Flammarion is a tenure-track assistant professor in computer science at EPFL. Prior to that, he was a postdoctoral fellow at UC Berkeley, hosted by Michael I. Jordan. He received his PhD in 2017 from Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris, where he was advised by Alexandre d’Aspremont and Francis Bach. In 2018 he received the prize of the Fondation Mathematique Jacques Hadamard for the best PhD thesis in the field of optimization. His research focuses primarily on learning problems at the interface of machine learning, statistics and optimization.