Gaétan Jean A de RassenfosseGaétan is Assistant Professor Tenure Track in Science & Technology Policy at EPFL. He joined the Institute of Technology and Public Policy at the College of Management of Technology in late 2014. Prior to that, he was a research fellow then a senior research fellow at the University of Melbourne (Australia) from 2010 to 2014. He was affiliated with the Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research at the Faculty of Business and Economics. Gaétan obtained a PhD in Economics from the Université libre de Bruxelles (Belgium), Solvay Brussels School of Economics and Management in 2010.
Henry MarkramHenry Markram started a dual scientific and medical career at the University of Cape Town, in South Africa. His scientific work in the 80s revealed the polymodal receptive fields of pontomedullary reticular formation neurons in vivo and how acetylcholine re-organized these sensory maps.
He moved to Israel in 1988 and obtained his PhD at the Weizmann Institute where he discovered a link between acetylcholine and memory mechanisms by being the first to show that acetylcholine modulates the NMDA receptor in vitro studies, and thereby gates which synapses can undergo synaptic plasticity. He was also the first to characterize the electrical and anatomical properties of the cholinergic neurons in the medial septum diagonal band.
He carried out a first postdoctoral study as a Fulbright Scholar at the NIH, on the biophysics of ion channels on synaptic vesicles using sub-fractionation methods to isolate synaptic vesicles and patch-clamp recordings to characterize the ion channels. He carried out a second postdoctoral study at the Max Planck Institute, as a Minerva Fellow, where he discovered that individual action potentials propagating back into dendrites also cause pulsed influx of Ca2 into the dendrites and found that sub-threshold activity could also activated a low threshold Ca2 channel. He developed a model to show how different types of electrical activities can divert Ca2 to activate different intracellular targets depending on the speed of Ca2 influx an insight that helps explain how Ca2 acts as a universal second messenger. His most well known discovery is that of the millisecond watershed to judge the relevance of communication between neurons marked by the back-propagating action potential. This phenomenon is now called Spike Timing Dependent Plasticity (STDP), which many laboratories around the world have subsequently found in multiple brain regions and many theoreticians have incorporated as a learning rule. At the Max-Planck he also started exploring the micro-anatomical and physiological principles of the different neurons of the neocortex and of the mono-synaptic connections that they form - the first step towards a systematic reverse engineering of the neocortical microcircuitry to derive the blue prints of the cortical column in a manner that would allow computer model reconstruction.
He received a tenure track position at the Weizmann Institute where he continued the reverse engineering studies and also discovered a number of core principles of the structural and functional organization such as differential signaling onto different neurons, models of dynamic synapses with Misha Tsodyks, the computational functions of dynamic synapses, and how GABAergic neurons map onto interneurons and pyramidal neurons. A major contribution during this period was his discovery of Redistribution of Synaptic Efficacy (RSE), where he showed that co-activation of neurons does not only alter synaptic strength, but also the dynamics of transmission. At the Weizmann, he also found the tabula rasa principle which governs the random structural connectivity between pyramidal neurons and a non-random functional connectivity due to target selection. Markram also developed a novel computation framework with Wolfgang Maass to account for the impact of multiple time constants in neurons and synapses on information processing called liquid computing or high entropy computing.
In 2002, he was appointed Full professor at the EPFL where he founded and directed the Brain Mind Institute. During this time Markram continued his reverse engineering approaches and developed a series of new technologies to allow large-scale multi-neuron patch-clamp studies. Markrams lab discovered a novel microcircuit plasticity phenomenon where connections are formed and eliminated in a Darwinian manner as apposed to where synapses are strengthening or weakened as found for LTP. This was the first demonstration that neural circuits are constantly being re-wired and excitation can boost the rate of re-wiring.
At the EPFL he also completed the much of the reverse engineering studies on the neocortical microcircuitry, revealing deeper insight into the circuit design and built databases of the blue-print of the cortical column. In 2005 he used these databases to launched the Blue Brain Project. The BBP used IBMs most advanced supercomputers to reconstruct a detailed computer model of the neocortical column composed of 10000 neurons, more than 340 different types of neurons distributed according to a layer-based recipe of composition and interconnected with 30 million synapses (6 different types) according to synaptic mapping recipes. The Blue Brain team built dozens of applications that now allow automated reconstruction, simulation, visualization, analysis and calibration of detailed microcircuits. This Proof of Concept completed, Markrams lab has now set the agenda towards whole brain and molecular modeling.
With an in depth understanding of the neocortical microcircuit, Markram set a path to determine how the neocortex changes in Autism. He found hyper-reactivity due to hyper-connectivity in the circuitry and hyper-plasticity due to hyper-NMDA expression. Similar findings in the Amygdala together with behavioral evidence that the animal model of autism expressed hyper-fear led to the novel theory of Autism called the Intense World Syndrome proposed by Henry and Kamila Markram. The Intense World Syndrome claims that the brain of an Autist is hyper-sensitive and hyper-plastic which renders the world painfully intense and the brain overly autonomous. The theory is acquiring rapid recognition and many new studies have extended the findings to other brain regions and to other models of autism.
Markram aims to eventually build detailed computer models of brains of mammals to pioneer simulation-based research in the neuroscience which could serve to aggregate, integrate, unify and validate our knowledge of the brain and to use such a facility as a new tool to explore the emergence of intelligence and higher cognitive functions in the brain, and explore hypotheses of diseases as well as treatments.
Touradj EbrahimiTouradj EBRAHIMI received his M.Sc. and Ph.D., both in Electrical Engineering, from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL), Lausanne, Switzerland, in 1989 and 1992 respectively. In 1993, he was a research engineer at the Corporate Research Laboratories of Sony Corporation in Tokyo, where he conducted research on advanced video compression techniques for storage applications. In 1994, he served as a research consultant at AT&T Bell Laboratories working on very low bitrate video coding. He is currently Professor at EPFL heading its Multimedia Signal Processing Group. He is also the Convenor of JPEG standardization Committee. He was also adjunct Professor with the Center of Quantifiable Quality of Service at Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU)between 2008 and 2012.
Prof. Ebrahimi has been the recipient of various distinctions and awards, such as the IEEE and Swiss national ASE award, the SNF-PROFILE grant for advanced researchers, Four ISO-Certificates for key contributions to MPEG-4 and JPEG 2000, and the best paper award of IEEE Trans. on Consumer Electronics . He became a Fellow of the international society for optical engineering (SPIE) in 2003. Prof. Ebrahimi has initiated more than two dozen National, European and International cooperation projects with leading companies and research institutes around the world. He is a co-founder of Genista SA, a high-tech start-up company in the field of multimedia quality metrics. In 2002, he founded Emitall SA, start-up active in the area of media security and surveillance. In 2005, he founded EMITALL Surveillance SA, a start-up active in the field of privacy and protection. He is or has been associate Editor with various IEEE, SPIE, and EURASIP journals, such as IEEE Signal Processing Magazine, IEEE Trans. on Image Processing, IEEE Trans. on Multimedia, EURASIP Image Communication Journal, EURASIP Journal of Applied Signal Processing, SPIE Optical Engineering Magazine. Prof. Ebrahimi is a member of Scientific Advisory Board of various start-up and established companies in the general field of Information Technology. He has served as Scientific Expert and Evaluator for Research Funding Agencies such as those of European Commission, The Greek Ministry of Development, The Austrian National Foundation for Scientific Research, The Portuguese Science Foundation, as well as a number of Venture Capital Companies active in the field of Information Technologies and Communication Systems. His research interests include still, moving, and 3D image processing and coding, visual information security (rights protection, watermarking, authentication, data integrity, steganography), new media, and human computer interfaces (smart vision, brain computer interface).
He is the author or the co-author of more than 200 research publications, and holds 14 patents. Prof. Ebrahimi is a member of IEEE, SPIE, ACM and IS&T.
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http://mmspl.epfl.ch Pascal FuaPascal Fua received an engineering degree from Ecole Polytechnique, Paris, in 1984 and the Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from the University of Orsay in 1989. He then worked at SRI International and INRIA Sophia-Antipolis as a Computer Scientist. He joined EPFL in 1996 where he is now a Professor in the School of Computer and Communication Science and heads the Computer Vision Laboratory. His research interests include shape modeling and motion recovery from images, analysis of microscopy images, and Augmented Reality. His research interests include shape modeling and motion recovery from images, analysis of microscopy images, and machine learning. He has (co)authored over 300 publications in refereed journals and conferences. He is an IEEE Fellow and has been an Associate Editor of IEEE journal Transactions for Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence. He often serves as program committee member, area chair, and program chair of major vision conferences and has cofounded three spinoff companies (Pix4D, PlayfulVision, and NeuralConcept).
Christoph FreiSince 2009
Secretary General
, World Energy Council (WEC).
Since 2006
Titulary Professor
, Advisor to the President of EPFL and EPFL's Energy Center on energy issues. Expertise: International energy & environment policy and strategy.
2001-2009
Senior Director
, Energy Industries & Strategy at the World Economic Forum (WEF); Member of the Forum's Executive Council.
2002-2003
Lecturer
, postgraduate course on "Energy Systems in an Economywide Framework", for the Master of Science in Energy Systems at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Lausanne (EPFL).
2001-2003
European Master in Applied Ethics
, Ethics Centre, University of Zurich; specialisation in multi-stakeholder theory.
2000-2001
Research fellow
at the Centre for Energy Policy and Economics of the Swiss Federal Institutes of Technology co-lecturing "Socio-economic aspects of Energy Systems".
1996-2000
Dr ès Sciences
, PhD thesis at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Lausanne (EPFL) and the Paul Scherrer Institute, Villigen (PSI). Domain: Modelling the links between Energy Policy, Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Economic Welfare.
1997-2000
Master (DES) in Econometrics
at the University of Geneva.
1995-1997
Master of Science in Energy Systems
at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Lausanne (EPFL); specialisation in Energy Economics and Management.
1995-2001
Research fellow
at the Laboratory of Energy Systems of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Lausanne (EPFL).
1989-1995
Dipl. El.-Ing.
, graduate studies in Electrical Engineering at the Swiss Federal Institutes of Technology, Zürich (ETHZ) (4th year in Lausanne); training/diploma thesis at the Institute of Microtechnique, University of Neuchâtel (UNINE) (solar cells research). Martin RajmanMartin Rajman is the EPFL Ambassador to digitalswitzerland (https://digitalswitzerland.com/), a Swiss-wide, multi-stakeholder initiative coordinating the contributions of its over 200 members to strengthen Switzerland’s position as a leading digital player.Until 2017, Martin Rajman has served as Executive Director of Nano-Tera.ch, a large Swiss Research Program funding collaborative multi-disciplinary projects for the engineering of complex systems in Health and the Environment. Since 2008, the Nano-Tera.ch program started more than 100 research projects for a total public funding of more than 95 Mo CHF (~100 Mo USD). Before being appointed as Nano-Tera.ch Executive Director, Martin Rajman was Director of the EPFL Global Computing Center (CGC), an association of research groups and laboratories of the School of Computer and Communication Sciences fostering interdisciplinary research in the general area of internet computing and distributed information systems. In this position, he was managing more than 20 European projects. In parallel with his research management activities, Martin Rajman is senior researcher at EPF Lausanne, Switzerland (EPFL). His research interests include Artificial Intelligence, Computational Linguistics and Data-driven Probabilistic Machine Learning.Martin Rajman has also been active in various large scale industry-research collaborations with majors economic players. In particular, he has been involved in the improvement of the product ranking technology used by e-Bay and collaborated with Elsevier on enhanced article recommendation techniques. Martin Rajman is author or co-author of more than 100 publications and former Director of the Computer Science Series of EPFL-Press (PPUR). 