Daniel ThalmannProf. Daniel Thalmann is Honorary Professor at EPFL and Director of Research development at MIRALab Sarl. He has been Visiting Professor at The Institute for Media Innovation (Nanyang Technological University, Singapore) from 2009 to 2017. He is a pioneer in research on Virtual Humans. His current research interests include Real-time Virtual Humans in Virtual Reality, crowd simulation, and 3D Interaction. Daniel Thalmann has been the Founder of The Virtual Reality Lab (VRlab) at EPFL, Switzerland, Professor at The University of Montreal and Visiting Professor/ Researcher at CERN, University of Nebraska, University of Tokyo, and National University of Singapore. Until October 2010, he was the President of the Swiss Association of Research in Information Technology and one Director of the European Research Consortium in Informatics and Mathematics (ERCIM). He is coeditor-in-chief of the Journal of Computer Animation and Virtual Worlds, and member of the editorial board of 6 other journals. Daniel Thalmann was member of numerous Program Committees, Program Chair and CoChair of several conferences including IEEE VR, ACM VRST, and ACM VRCAI. Daniel Thalmann has published more than 500 papers in Graphics, Animation, and Virtual Reality. He is coeditor of 30 books, and coauthor of several books including 'Crowd Simulation' (second edition 2012) and 'Stepping Into Virtual Reality' (2007), published by Springer. He received his PhD in Computer Science in 1977 from the University of Geneva and an Honorary Doctorate (Honoris Causa) from University Paul- Sabatier in Toulouse, France, in 2003. He also received the Eurographics Distinguished Career Award in 2010 and the 2012 Canadian Human Computer Communications Society Achievement Award. Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Thalmann Lenka ZdeborováLenka Zdeborová is a Professor of Physics and of Computer Science in École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne where she leads the Statistical Physics of Computation Laboratory. She received a PhD in physics from University Paris-Sud and from Charles University in Prague in 2008. She spent two years in the Los Alamos National Laboratory as the Director's Postdoctoral Fellow. Between 2010 and 2020 she was a researcher at CNRS working in the Institute of Theoretical Physics in CEA Saclay, France. In 2014, she was awarded the CNRS bronze medal, in 2016 Philippe Meyer prize in theoretical physics and an ERC Starting Grant, in 2018 the Irène Joliot-Curie prize, in 2021 the Gibbs lectureship of AMS. She is an editorial board member for Journal of Physics A, Physical Review E, Physical Review X, SIMODS, Machine Learning: Science and Technology, and Information and Inference. Lenka's expertise is in applications of concepts from statistical physics, such as advanced mean field methods, replica method and related message-passing algorithms, to problems in machine learning, signal processing, inference and optimization. She enjoys erasing the boundaries between theoretical physics, mathematics and computer science.
Paul XirouchakisPaul Xirouchakis obtained his diplôme in mechanical and electrical engineering at the National Technical University of Athens, Greece in 1971. He continued his education at the Ecole Nationale Superieure de Techniques Avancées, in Paris, France where he obtained his diplôme dIngénieur de lE.N.S.T.A. et dIngénieur civil du Génie Maritime in 1973. He obtained his PhD degree in Structural Mechanics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1978. He was appointed thereafter assistant and later associate professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1978-1985). Subsequently he was nominated associate professor at the National Technical University in Athens (1985-1987). After about eight years working in the industry with JJMA, Arlington, Virginia (in parallel he also obtained a PhD degree in Information Technology, in 1992 from George Mason University) he was nominated at EPFL professor of computer-aided design and manufacturing since July 1995. At EPFL he teaches design for X at the bachelors level, computer-aided manufacturing and multi-body dynamics simulation at the masters level and manufacturing information systems at the doctoral level. His research covers the development of methods and computer tools for the (sustainable) product design and manufacturing. Current research projects deal with the development of method and tools for resource efficient part manufacturing, chatter-free part programming, development of a virtual multi-body dynamics machine tool environment and composites drilling programming.
Nicolas Henri Bernard FlammarionNicolas 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.
Heinz HügliHeinz Hügli est professeur honoraire à l'Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL). Il a été directeur de recherches et professeur associé à l'Institut de Microtechnique de l'Université de Neuchâtel, Suisse, où il était chargé d'un enseignement et dirigeait le Laboratoire de Reconnaissance des Formes. De 1988 à 2008, ce laboratoire a conduit des recherches dans les domaines de la vision par ordinateur, avec un accent particulier sur la vision précoce, l'inspection industrielle, la modélisation et la reconnaissance d'objets 3D. Heinz Hügli est ingénieur diplômé de l'Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Zurich (EPFZ) où il obtint aussi son titre de docteur en sciences techniques. Il a travaillé cinq ans dans le cadre du groupe de traitement des images à l'EPFZ et deux ans avec le Medical Imaging Science Group, University of Southern California. En 1982, il rejoint l'Université de Neuchâtel, Suisse, où il conduisit des recherches dans le domaine du traitement de la parole avant de créer le Laboratoire de reconnaissance des formes (PARLAB). Il a enseigné à l'Université de Neuchâtel, l'Université de Berne et l'EPFL. Auteur de plus de 150 publications scientifiques, il a présidé des conférences internationales, a été membre de plusieurs socités scientifiques et a participé aux comités de programmes de nombreuses conférences.
Jacques FellayJacques Fellay is a medical scientist with expertise in infectious diseases and human genomics. He obtained his MD from the University of Lausanne in 2002 and his PhD from University of Utrecht. After a clinical training in infectious diseases in Switzerland and a 4-years postdoctoral fellowship at Duke University, he joined the EPFL in April 2011 with an SNF Professorship.
On top of his EPFL affiliation, Jacques is also Head of Precision Medicine at the University Hospital (CHUV) in Lausanne, Group Leader at the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics, and Co-director of the Health2030 Genome Center at Campus Biotech in Geneva.
