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 Roland LogéRoland Logé is an associate professor at EPFL, with a primary affiliation to the Materials Institute, and a secondary affiliation to the Microengineering Institute.
After graduating in 1994 at UCL (Belgium) in Materials Engineering, he earned a Master of Science in Mechanics in 1995, at UCSB Santa Barbara (USA). He received his PhD at Mines Paristech-CEMEF (France) in 1999, where he specialized in metal forming and associated microstructure evolutions. After a postdoc at Cornell University (USA) between 1999 and 2001, he entered CNRS in France.
In 2008, he was awarded the ALCAN prize from the French Academy of Sciences, together with Yvan Chastel.
In 2009 he became head of the Metallurgy-Structure-Rheology research group at CEMEF.
In 2011, he launched a “Groupement de Recherche” (GDR), funded by CNRS, networking most of the researchers in France involved in recrystallization and grain growth.
In 2013, he became Research Director at CNRS.
In March 2014 he joined EPFL as the head of the Laboratory of Thermomechanical Metallurgy.
Jamie PaikProf. Jamie Paik is founder and director of the Reconfigurable Robotics Lab (RRL) of Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL) and a core member of Swiss NCCR robotics group. The RRL leverages expertise in multi-material fabrication and smart material actuation for novel robot designs. She received her PhD in Seoul National University on designing humanoid arm and a hand while being sponsored by Samsung Electronics. This 7-DoF humanoid arm was the lightest in the literature at that time being 3.7kg including the 8-DoF hand. During her Postdoctoral positions in the Institut des Systems Intelligents et de Robotic in Universitat Pierre Marie Curie, Paris VI, she developed laparoscopic tools named JAiMY that are internationally patented and commercialized now by Endocontrol-medical.com. At Harvard University’s Microrobotics Laboratory, she started developing unconventional robots that push the physical limits of material and mechanisms. Her latest research effort is in soft robotics including self-morphing Robogami (robotic origami) that transforms its planar shape to 2D or 3D by folding in predefined patterns and sequences, just like the paper art, origami.
Hubert GiraultEducation: 1979 - Engineering diploma from Grenoble Institute of Technology. FRANCE. 1982 - PhD- Department of Chemistry, University of Southampton. Thesis entitled : Interfacial studies using drop image processing techniques. Positions : 1982 - 1984 SERC Research Fellow. University of Southampton. 1984 - 1985 CNRS Research Fellow. University of Southampton. 1985 - 1992 Lecturer in Physical Chemistry, University of Edinburgh. 1992 - Professor of Physical Chemistry, Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne. 2011 - 2014 Dean of Bachelor and Master studies Hubert Girault is the author of 2 textbooks, the co-author of about 600 scientific publications with more than 20'000 citations and the co-inventor of more than 15 patents. During his academic career, he has supervised 70 PhD students. 30 alumni of his laboratory are now Professors. Honours: Faraday medal 2006, Royal Society of Chemistry, Fellow of the International Society of Electrochemistry 2007, Reilley Award 2015. Fellow of the Electrochemical Society (USA), Shikata International medal, Polarography Society of Japan. Associate editor of Chemical Science
