Alcherio MartinoliI received my Diploma in Electrical Engineering from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETHZ), and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL). I am currently an Associate Professor at the School of Architecture, Civil, and Environmental Engineering and the head of the Distributed Intelligent Systems and Algorithms Laboratory. Before joining EPFL I carried out research activities at the Institute of Biomedical Engineering of the ETHZ, at the Institute of Industrial Automation of the Spanish Research Council in Madrid, Spain, and at the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, U.S.A. Additional information can be found on my full CV.
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
Auke IjspeertAuke Ijspeert is a full professor at the EPFL, and head of the Biorobotics Laboratory (BioRob). He has a B.Sc./M.Sc. in physics from the EPFL (1995), and a PhD in artificial intelligence from the University of Edinburgh (1999). He carried out postdocs at IDSIA and EPFL, and at the University of Southern California (USC). He then became a research assistant professor at USC, and an external collaborator at ATR (Advanced Telecommunications Research institute) in Japan. In 2002, he came back to the EPFL as an SNF assistant professor. He was promoted to associate professor in October 2009 and to full professor in April 2016. His primary affiliation is with the Institute of Bioengineering, and secondary affiliation with the Institute of Mechanical Engineering. His research interests are at the intersection between robotics, computational neuroscience, nonlinear dynamical systems, and machine learning. He is interested in using numerical simulations and robots to get a better understanding of sensorimotor coordination in animals, and in using inspiration from biology to design novel types of robots and adaptive controllers. (see for instance Ijspeert et al Science 2007, Ijspeert Science 2014, and Nyakatura et al Nature 2019). He is also investigating how to assist people with limited mobility using exoskeletons and assistive furniture. He is regularly invited to give talks on these topics (e.g. TED talk given at TED Global Geneva, Dec 8 2015). With his colleagues, he has received paper awards at ICRA2002, CLAWAR2005, IEEE Humanoids 2007, IEEE ROMAN 2014, CLAWAR 2015, SAB2018, and CLAWAR 2019. He is an IEEE Fellow, member of the Board of Reviewing Editors of Science magazine, and associate editor for the IEEE Transactions on Medical Robotics and Bionics and for the International Journal of Humanoid Robotics. He has acted as an associate editor for the IEEE Transactions on Robotics (2009-2013) and for Soft Robotics (2018-2021). He was a guest editor for the Proceedings of IEEE, IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering, Autonomous Robots, IEEE Robotics and Automation Magazine, and Biological Cybernetics. He has been the organizer of 7 international conferences (BioADIT2004, SAB2004, AMAM2005, BioADIT2006, LATSIS2006, SSRR2016, AMAM2019), and a program committee member of over 50 conferences.
Roland SiegwartOriginaire d'Altdorf (UR) et d'Oberkirch (LU), Roland Siegwart est né en 1959 à Lausanne. Après une enfance à Schwyz, il a étudié à l'EPFZ et a obtenu son diplôme en génie mécanique en 1983. Il a travaillé ensuite comme assistant de recherche à l'EPFZ. En 1989, il a obtenu son doctorat, sa thèse traitant de l'application des paliers magnétiques sur les machines d'usinage de grande vitesse.
De 1989 à 1990, il a effectué des recherches à l'Université de Stanford en Californie (USA) et a participé à des projets en microrobotique. De retour en Suisse, il a rejoint l'Institut de robotique à l'EPFZ. Comme directeur remplaçant de l'Institut de Robotique, il a organisé les activités dans la micro- et nanorobotique. Il a mis notamment au pointuncourensystèmesélectroméca-niques appliqués.
Depuis 1990, R. Siegwart a été engagé en parallèle comme vice président de MECOS Traxler AG, une entreprise spin-off' de l'EPFZ. Il a dirigé de nombreux projets industriels dans le domaine des paliers magnétiques. ProfesseurauDépartementdemicrote-chnique de l'EPFL depuis 1996, R. Siegwart est responsable de la recherche en systèmes microtechniques autonomes. Le champ principal de ses activités porte sur les robots et les microrobots mobiles ainsi que les microsystèmes dynamiques et de très hautes performances.
Pierre DillenbourgAncien instituteur primaire, Pierre Dillenbourg obtient un master en Sciences de lEducation (Université de Mons, Belgique). Dans son projet de master en 1986, il est l'un des premiers au monde à appliquer les méthodes de 'machine learning' à l'éducation, afin de développer un 'self-improving teaching system'. Ceci lui permettra de débuter une thèse de doctorat en informatique à l'Université de Lancaster (UK) dans le domaine des applications éducatives de lintelligence artificielle. Il a été Maître dEnseignement et de Recherche à lUniversité de Genève. Il rejoint l'EPFL en 2012, où Il fut le directeur du Centre de Recherche sur l'Apprentissage, la formation et ses technologies(CRAFT), puis académique du Centre pour l'Education à l'Ere Digitale (CEDE) qui met en oeuvre la stratégie MOOC de l'EPFL (plus de 2 millions d'inscriptions). Il est actuellement professeur ordinaire en technologies de formation aux sein de la faculté Informatique et Communications et dirige laboratoire d'ergonomie éducative (CHILI). Depuis 2006, il a aussi été le directeur de DUAL-T, la 'leading house' dédiée aux technologies pour les systèmes de formation professionnelle duale. Il a fondé plusieurs start-ups dans l'éducation et rejoint plusieurs conseils d'administration. En 2017, Il a créé avec des collègues le 'Swiss EdTech Collider', un incubateur qui rassemble 80 start-ups dans le domaine des technologies éducatives. En 2018, ils ont lancé LEARN, le centre EPFL pour les sciences de l'apprentissage, lequel regroupe les initiatives locales en innovation éducative. Pierre est un 'inaugural fellow of the International Society of Learning Sciences'. Il est actuellement le Vice-Président Associé pour l'Education à l'EPFL.
Reymond ClavelReymond CLAVEL obtained his degree in mechanical engineering at the Federal Institute of Technology of Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland, in 1973. After nine years of gathered experience in industrial plants at Hermes Precisa International (research and development), he was appointed professor at the EPFL, where he obtained his PhD degree in parallel robotics in 1991. He was then consecutively entrusted with the following positions: Head of the department, Director of the Section of micro engineering and, in 1993, Director of the Laboratory of robotics systems (LSRO). His present research topics are parallel robotics, high speed and high precision robotics, medical and surgical robotics applications, surgical instrumentation and precision mechanisms.
Reymond Clavels research successes in parallel and industrial robotics received worldwide special mentions.
Awards :
1989: Laureate of the JIRA AWARD (Japan Industrial Robot Association) for the DELTA parallel robot invented in 1985.
1996: Project winner of the Technologiestandort Schweiz competition and ABB Sonderpreis for the best robotics project.
1998: His laboratory is awarded the Grand Prix de lInnovation in Monaco for new robot technologies.
1999: Laureate of the Golden Robot Award for the DELTA Robot.
2003: Each of his three different submitted projects received the Swiss Technology Award.
2005: Project winner of the Swiss Technology Award competition with further the Sonderpreis 2005 from the Vontobel Foundation in the field of Inventing the future.
2006: Project winner of the Swiss Technology Award competition with Quantum leap into world of nano-EDM (a new high precision EDM machine based on the Delta kinematics).
2007: Two projects based on the LSROs researches are winner of the Swiss Technology Award competition: Cyberthosis for paraplegia rehabilitation (a collaboration with the company Swortec and the Fondation Suisse pour les Cyberthèses (FSC)) and the Microfactory realized in partnership with the CSEM .
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.
