Michele CeriottiMichele Ceriotti received his Ph.D. in Physics from ETH Zürich in 2010. He spent three years in Oxford as a Junior Research Fellow at Merton College. Since 2013 he leads the laboratory for Computational Science and Modeling in the Institute of Materials at EPFL. His research revolves around the atomic-scale modelling of materials, based on the sampling of quantum and thermal fluctuations and on the use of machine learning to predict and rationalize structure-property relations. He has been awarded the IBM Research Forschungspreis in 2010, the Volker Heine Young Investigator Award in 2013, an ERC Starting Grant in 2016, and the IUPAP C10 Young Scientist Prize in 2018.
Roberto CastelloRoberto Castello is a senior scientist and group leader at the EPFL Laboratory of Solar Energy and Building Physics. Physicist by training, he has extensive experience in collecting, classifying and interpreting large datasets using advanced data mining techniques and statistical methods. He received his MSc (2007) in Particle Physics and PhD (2010) in Physics and Astrophysics from the University of Torino. He worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the Belgian National Research Fund (2011-2014) and at the CERN Experimental Physics Department (2015-2017) as a research fellow and data scientist. He is primary author of more than 20 peer-reviewed publications and he presented at major international conferences in the high energy physics domain.
In 2018 he joined the Solar Energy and Building Physics Laboratory (LESO-PB) to work on data mining and Machine Learning techniques for the built environment and renewable energy. His main research interests are: spatio-temporal modeling of renewable energy potential, energy consumption forecasting techniques, anomaly detection, and computer vision techniques for automated classification in the built environment.
He leads the group of Urban Data Mining, Intelligence and Simulation at LESO-PB and he is a member of the NRP75 Big Data project (HyEnergy) of the Swiss National Science Foundation. He is a member of the Swiss Competence Centre for Energy Research (SCCER) and deputy leader of the working group on Leveraging Ubiquitous Energy Data. He has served as a scientific committee member, workshop organizer and speaker at international conferences (ICAE 2020, Applied Machine Learning Days 2019 and 2020, CISBAT 2019 and 2021 and SDS2020).
Since 2017 he is member of the Geneva 2030 Ecosystem network, promoting the United Nations agenda towards the realization of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
Elyahou KaponEli Kapon received his Ph.D. in physics from Tel Aviv University, Israel in 1982. He then spent two years at the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, as a Chaim Weizmann Research Fellow, where he worked mainly on phase-locked arrays of semiconductor lasers. From 1984 till 1993 he was with Bellcore, New Jersey, first as member of technical staff, and from 1989 as District Manager. At Bellcore, he worked on integrated optics in III-V compounds and on low-dimensional semiconductor nanostructures, particularly quantum wires and quantum dots. He managed the Quantum Structures District and the Integrated Optoelectronics District at Bellcore from 1989 till 1992 and from 1992 till 1993, respectively. In 1993 he was appointed Professor of Physics of Nanostructures at the Physics Department of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL), where he heads the Laboratory of Physics of Nanostructures. In 1999-2000 he spent his sabbatical as Sackler Scholar at the Mortimer and Raymond Sackler Institute of Advanced Studies in Tel Aviv University, Israel. During that period he helped establishing the Tel Aviv University Center for Nanoscience and Nanotechnology and served as its first Director from 2000 to 2002. In 2001 he founded the start up BeamExpress and has been serving as its Chief Scientist. He is currently serving as Director of the Institute of Quantum Electronics and Photonics in the Faculty of Basic Sciences at EPFL. His research interests include self-organization of nanostructures, optical properties and electron transport in low-dimensional quantum structures, quantum wire and quantum dot lasers, photonic crystals and vertical cavity surface emitting lasers. He is author or co-author of >300 journal articles, >10 patents, and editor of two books on semiconductor lasers.
Prof. Kapon is Fellow of the Optical Society of America, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, and the American Physical Society of America, and a recipient of a 2007 Humboldt Research Award.
Yves PedrazziniDétenteur d'un doctorat ès sciences (section architecture) et d'une licence en sociologie, Yves Pedrazzini est Maître d'Enseignement et de Recherche (MER / Senior Scientist) au Laboratoire de sociologie urbaine (LASUR) et chargé de cours de la section d'architecture de l'Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne. Depuis plus de 30 ans, il analyse les dynamiques urbaines, les pratiques spatiales, les cultures urbaines -dont le hip hop et les sports de rue tel que le basket de playground et le skateboard-, les phénomènes de violence et d'insécurité, dans les pays du Sud et du Nord. Dès 1987, il mène des recherches ethnographiques sur les mutations des grandes villes dAmérique latine, plus spécialement les gangs de jeunes des bidonvilles de Caracas, Bogota ou San Salvador. A cette fin, il a développé des méthodes qualitatives novatrices, s'inspirant des recherches-actions participatives qui situent l'acteur social au centre du dispositif d'observation. En 1994, Yves Pedrazzini obtient le titre de docteur ès sciences de l'EPFL. A partir de 1997, il ajoute à son expérience urbaine latino-américaine (Brésil, Bolivie, Colombie, Cuba, El Salvador, Mexique, Venezuela) une nouvelle expertise africaine (Sénégal, Ethiopie), puis l'Asie (Pakistan, Népal, Inde...) et la Chine, à partir de 2000, enfin la Palestine, le Liban... Depuis lors, Yves Pedrazzini dirige des projets de recherche internationale en partenariat avec des chercheurs (latino-)américains et africains. Il a publié de nombreux livres et articles sur les thématiques urbaines, notamment les violences urbaines et les cultures de rue, d'un point de vue théorique et méthodologique. A partir de cette expérience de terrain, il a entrepris la relation d'une "histoire secrète" de l'urbanisme, celle des bidonvilles, des résistances d'habitants ordinaires à la violence de l'urbanisation et de la planification urbaine, l'urbanisme des barricades contre celui d'Haussmann. Cette histoire est aussi celle des mémoires collectives populaire, résistant à leur effacement. S'en est suivi dès 2015, la création du collectif d'urbanistes "ARCHITECTURE & RÉSISTANCE", en Espagne, Suisse et Venezuela. Enfin, en essayant d'assembler les enseignements de tous ces projets, Pedrazzini mène un projet sans fin d'identification de la nouvelle matière sociale et spatiale de la ville contemporaine, une narration qu'il désigne désormais sous le nom de PUNKSPACE.
