Peter RyserDr. Peter Ryser is a Professor Emeritus at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne. He has over three decades of research and teaching experience from various corporate and academic institutions. He was previously a Director at Siemens Building Technologies where he was responsible for R&D, product innovation and patents. Dr. Ryser has a Ph.D. in applied Physics from the University of Geneva, a Masters degree in Experimental Physics and an MBA.
Denis GilletDenis Gillet received the Diploma in Electrical Engineering from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL) in 1988, and the Ph.D. degree in Information Systems also from the EPFL in 1995. During 1992 he was appointed as Research Fellow at the Information Systems Laboratory of Stanford University in the United States. He is currently Maître d'enseignement et de recherche at the EPFL School of Engineering, where he leads the React research group. His current research interests include Technologies Enhanced Learning (TEL), Human Computer Interaction (HCI), Human Devices Interaction (HDI) and Optimal Coordination of Complex and Distributed Systems. Denis Gillet is affiliated at EPFL with the Center for Intelligent Systems and the Center for Digital Education.
Dario FloreanoProf. 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
Juan Carlos FarahJuan Carlos Farah received his Bachelor of Arts in Economics from Harvard University, completed studies in Computer Science at Stanford University, and a Master of Science in Computing at Imperial College London. Since 2017, Juan Carlos has worked as a researcher and software engineer at the Interaction Systems Group (REACT) of the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL). He is the technical lead for the Graasp Ecosystem, a suite of native and web applications that support digital education activities and are the core technology behind the Horizon 2020 Next-Lab and GO-GA European Innovation Action Projects. As a part of these projects, Juan Carlos conducted research on privacy-preserving systems for technology-enhanced learning. He is currently pursuing a PhD in Robotics and Intelligent Systems at EPFL, focusing on human-computer interaction and the perception of anthropomorphic traits in intelligent conversational agents. As part of his teaching duties, he gives a yearly lecture on trust, privacy and reputation frameworks for social media platforms.
Ambrogio FasoliAmbrogio FASOLI was born on November 10, 1964, in Milano, Italy. After a classical high school diploma (Maturità Classica) and graduation from the University of Milano, with the degree of Dottore in Fisica, he obtained his Phd at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale (EPFL) with a thesis on chaos in wave-particle interactions in plasmas, which was awarded the Best EPFL Thesis prize, in 1993. He then moved to the JET Joint Undertaking, the largest worlds fusion device, near Oxford, UK, to investigate Alfvén waves and burning plasma physics. In 1995-1996 he took a sabbatical leave, visiting several Universities and Research Institutes in Europe and in the USA, including three months at General Atomics in San Diego. In 1996-1997, during a second period at JET, he participated in the fusion power worlds record experiments in Deuterium-Tritium plasmas at JET. In 1997 he was nominated Assistant Professor in MIT Physics Department, where he led a basic plasma physics group and the international collaboration between MIT and JET. In 2001 Ambrogio FASOLI was nominated Assistant Professor of Physics at EPFL, Lausanne, Switzerland, and Professeur Boursier of the Swiss National Science Foundation. He became member of CRPP Directorate and took the leadership of CRPP basic plasma physics group and of the TCV tokamak, one of the major fusion experiments worldwide. At European level he was scientific coordinator for JET experiments, spokesperson for multi-machine experiments in the frame of International Tokamak Physics Activities, and Project Leader for a JET Enhancement project. In 2005 he became Associate Professor of Physics with tenure at EPFL, then member of EFDA Science and Technology Advisory Committee, and of the Steering Committee of the Association EURATOM-Swiss Confederation. From 2006 he was also Deputy Director, then from 2007 Executive Director of CRPP and from 2008 Full Professor of Physics at EPFL. For a number of years he was the Chair of the EPFL Physics Strategic Committee and a member of the Directorate of the EPFL School of Sciences. Since the summer of 2014 Professor FASOLI was the sole Director of CRPP. He now represents Switzerland in the EUROfusion General Assembly and Bureau, and in the Governing Board for Fusion for Energy. He is member of the EUROfusion DEMO project Board, of the Scientific Board of the Helmotz Virtual Institute on Advanced Microwave Diagnostics, of the European Delegation for the Cooperation between Euratom and the Government of India in Fusion Energy Research, of the European Consortium for the development of the ITER gyratron (EGYC), and participates to numerous international review panels. He chairs the FuseNet Academic Council, the International Advisory Panel for the Laboratory of Excellence Plas@Par in the Sorbonne Universities, the European Consortium for the construction of the ITER microwave Upper Launcher (ECHUL), and the Promotion Committee of the EPFL Faculty of Basic Sciences. He is one the three European representatives in the International Tokamak Physics Activities Coordinating Committee, advising ITER, and the Editor-in-Chief of the IAEA journal Nuclear Fusion. Since January 2019, Ambrogio Fasoli is the Chair of the General Assembly, i.e. the president of EUROfusion, the European Consortium for Development of Fusion Energy. Professor FASOLI is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and since 2001 a Visiting Professor at MIT Physics Department. He is the Director of the Swiss Plasma Center.
Jürgen BruggerI am a Professor of Microengineering and co-affiliated to Materials Science. Before joining EPFL I was at the MESA Research Institute of Nanotechnology at the University of Twente in the Netherlands, at the IBM Zurich Research Laboratory, and at the Hitachi Central Research Laboratory, in Tokyo, Japan. I received a Master in Physical-Electronics and a PhD degree from Neuchâtel University, Switzerland. Research in my laboratory focuses on various aspects of MEMS and Nanotechnology. My group contributes to the field at the fundamental level as well as in technological development, as demonstrated by the start-ups that spun off from the lab. In our research, key competences are in micro/nanofabrication, additive micro-manufacturing, new materials for MEMS, increasingly for wearable and biomedical applications. Together with my students and colleagues we published over 200 peer-refereed papers and I had the pleasure to supervise over 25 PhD students. Former students and postdocs have been successful in receiving awards and starting their own scientific careers. I am honoured for the appointment in 2016 as Fellow of the IEEE “For contributions to micro and nano manufacturing technology”. In 2017 my lab was awarded an ERC AdvG in the field of advanced micro-manufacturing.
