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 Ronan BoulicI come from Brittany, France, where I have completed my PhD degree in Computer Science in 1986 from the University of Rennes, France, at the INRIA-IRISA research institute. I also received the Habilitation degree from the University of Grenoble, France, in march 1995. I was hired in 1989 as First Assistant in the VRLAB, I became scientific collaborator, and senior researcher. I'm presently Senior Scientist (MER) and leader of the Immersive Interaction research Group (IIG). I'm co-author of around 150 research papers among which 43 appeared in international peer-reviewed journals. I have contributed to multiple SNF projects and EU projects. Please check iig.epfl.ch for more details.
Christophe AnceyChristophe Ancey has both a PhD and an engineering degree granted by the Ecole Centrale de Paris and the Grenoble National Polytechnic Institute. Trained as a hydraulics engineer, he did his doctoral work under the supervision of Pierre Evesque from 1994 to 1997 on rheology of granular flows in simple shearing. He was recruited in 1998 as a researcher in rheology at the Cemagref as part of the Erosion Protection team directed by Jean-Pierre Feuvrier, which has since become the laboratoire "Storm Erosion, Snow and Avalanche Laboratory". Parallel to this research activity, with Claude Charlier He set up a consulting firm for engineering contracting called Toraval (www.toraval.fr), which has become the major player in the avalanche field in France. Since 2004, He is a fluid-mechanics professor at EPFL and he is the director of the Environmental Hydraulics Laboratory.
He is associate editor of Water Resources Research, one of the leading journal in the field. Jonathan GravesProf. Jonathan P. Graves is a Senior Scientist at EPFL and Honorary Visiting Professor at the University of York, UK. He achieved first class joint honours in Electronic Engineering and Mathematics from the University of Nottingham, UK in 1996. He completed his Ph.D. in Theoretical Mechanics from the University of Nottingham, UK, three years later in 1999. During his Ph.D. he was based in the Culham theory group of the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority, developing kinetic descriptions of the internal kink instability, and participating in deuterium-tritium experimental analysis in the Joint European Torus. After a short time in industry, and a postdoc at Nottingham University, he took a position at the Swiss Plasma Center at EPFL, becoming a Senior Scientist in 2014, and became an Honorary Visiting Professor at the University of York, UK, in 2020. In 2015 he became a member of the EUROfusion Scientific and Technical Advisory Committee (STAC) and a member of the EUROfusion DEMO Technical Advisory Group. He is on the editorial board for the journal Plasma Physics and Controlled Fusion, and in 2020 became Scientific Secretary of the Varenna-Lausanne International Workshop in Theory of Fusion Plasmas.
Ali H. SayedAli H. Sayed est doyen de la Faculté des sciences et techniques de l’ingénieur (STI) de l'EPFL, en Suisse, où il dirige également le laboratoire de systèmes adaptatifs. Il a également été professeur émérite et président du département d'ingénierie électrique de l'UCLA. Il est reconnu comme un chercheur hautement cité et est membre de la US National Academy of Engineering. Il est également membre de l'Académie mondiale des sciences et a été président de l'IEEE Signal Processing Society en 2018 et 2019.
Le professeur Sayed est auteur et co-auteur de plus de 570 publications et de six monographies. Ses recherches portent sur plusieurs domaines, dont les théories d'adaptation et d'apprentissage, les sciences des données et des réseaux, l'inférence statistique et les systèmes multi-agents, entre autres.
Ses travaux ont été récompensés par plusieurs prix importants, notamment le prix Fourier de l'IEEE (2022), le prix de la société Norbert Wiener (2020) et le prix de l'éducation (2015) de la société de traitement des signaux de l'IEEE, le prix Papoulis (2014) de l'Association européenne de traitement des signaux, le Meritorious Service Award (2013) et le prix de la réalisation technique (2012) de la société de traitement des signaux de l'IEEE, le prix Terman (2005) de la société américaine de formation des ingénieurs, le prix de conférencier émérite (2005) de la société de traitement des signaux de l'IEEE, le prix Koweït (2003) et le prix Donald G. Fink (1996) de l'IEEE. Ses publications ont été récompensées par plusieurs prix du meilleur article de l'IEEE (2002, 2005, 2012, 2014) et de l'EURASIP (2015). Pour finir, Ali H. Sayed est aussi membre de l'IEEE, d'EURASIP et de l'American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), l'éditeur de la revue Science.
