Concept
Declarative knowledge
Personnes associées (42)
Gabriela Tejada Guerrero
Gabriela has extensive expertise in international cooperation in education, research and innovation. She joined EPFL as scientist at the Cooperation and Development Center (CODEV) where she led the EPFL Leading House Program (2014-2017) of the Swiss government, which upheld Swiss bilateral research cooperation with Brazil, India, Vietnam and Latin America. Her research focused on scientific diasporas and skilled migration with diverse international collaborations under her leadership. She worked at the University of Zurich, and the UNDP in Moldova and Geneva, and taught at the Monterrey Institute of Technology (ITESM). She was visiting researcher at the CES at Harvard University and the CIS at ETH Zurich. Gabriela obtained a BA in International Relations from the UIA (Ibero) in Mexico, and a PhD in Political Sciences from the UAB in Barcelona. She obtained a CAS IPA - International Policy and Advocacy of the D-MTEC, ETH Zurich (2019). Since 2020 Gabriela is Vice-President of the Swiss Commission for UNESCO (member since 2016), where she promotes science-society linkages and advocates for an inclusive development and dialogue through education, science and culture.Since May 2019, Gabriela is Academic Deputy at the Direction of the College of Humanities (CDH). She serves the Scholars at Risk program (SAR) at EPFL in an advisory capacity.
Dieter Dietz
Dieter Dietz has been educated at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich and has studied at the Cooper Union in New York City with Diller/Scofidio. He has received his degree in architecture in 1991 at ETH Zurich. He has worked with Diane Lewis Architects in New York and with Herzog & de Meuron in Basel. With partner architect Urs Egg he was a founding member of UNDEND Architecture in Zurich in 1997, an architectural practice with award winning entries in national and international competitions. Currently he is building up dieterdietz.org, a firm engaging in projects in urban design, media and architecture. From 1996 to 1999 Dieter Dietz has taught as Junior Faculty with Professor Marc Angélil at ETH Zurich. Since 2006 Dieter Dietz is Associate Professor for Architectural Design at EPFL in Lausanne and director of the ALICE laboratory in the ENAC faculty. He collaborates with the ALICE team on research projects at diverse scales with labs inside and outside EPFL. His teaching activities include the direction of the first year architectural design course as well as projects at master and thesis level.
Marilyne Andersen
Marilyne Andersen est professeure ordinaire en technologies durables de la construction et dirige le Laboratoire Performance Intégrée au Design (LIPID) qu'elle a fondé en automne 2010. Elle a été Doyenne de la Faculté de l'Environnement Naturel, Architectural et Construit (ENAC) de l'EPFL de 2013 à 2018 et est la Directrice Académique du Smart Living Lab à Fribourg. Elle co-dirige également le Student Kreativity and Innovation Laboratory (SKIL) à l'ENAC.Avant de rejoindre l'EPFL, elle était professeure assistante puis associée (tenure-track) dans le Building Technology Group du MIT, au sein du Département d'Architecture, où elle a fondé et dirigé le MIT Daylighting Lab depuis 2004. Elle a aussi été professeure invitée à la Singapore University of Technology and Design en 2019. Marilyne Andersen détient un Master ès sciences en physique et s'est spécialisée dans l'éclairage naturel durant sa thèse dans la physique du bâtiment à l'EPFL au Laboratoire d'énergie solaire et de physique du bâtiment (LESO) ainsi qu'en tant que chercheuse invitée au Building Technologies Department du Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory en Californie. Ses recherches se situent à l'interface entre sciences, ingénierie et architecture avec une attention spécifique sur l'impact de la lumière naturelle sur les occupants d'un bâtiment. Avec un focus sur les questions de confort, de perception et de santé et leurs implications énergétiques, ces efforts de recherche visent à une intégration plus profonde de la performance lumineuse et du confort intérieur dans le processus de conception, grâce à de nouvelles synergies avec d'autres domaines scientifiques, comme la chronobiologie et les neurosciences ainsi que la psychophysique ou l'informatique et l'imagerie digitale. Elle s'appuie sur ces recherches pour les étendre à la pratique architecturale à travers la startup OCULIGHT dynamics qu'elle a co-fondée, et qui offre des services spécialisés en éclairage naturel avec un accent particulier sur les effets psycho-physiologiques de la lumière naturelle sur les occupants d'un bâtiment. Elle est l'auteure de plus de 200 articles référés publiés dans des revues scientifiques et lors de conférences internationales, ainsi que la lauréate de plusieurs bourses et prix dont: le Daylight Award for Research (2016), onze prix et distinctions pour ses publications (2009, 2011, 2012, 2015, 2018, 2019, 2021) dont le Taylor Technical Talent Award 2009 décerné par la Illuminating Engineering Society, le 3M Non-Tenured Faculty Award (2009), le Mitsui Career Development Professorship au MIT (2008) et le prix EPFL de la Fondation Chorafas en durabilité attribué pour sa thèse (2005). Ses travaux de recherche ou d'enseignement ont été soutenus par des organisations professionnelles, institutionnelles et industrielles tels que les Fonds National pour la Recherche Scientifique (en Suisse et aux USA), la fondation Velux, le programme Européen Horizon 2020, la Boston Society of Architects, la MIT Energy Initiative et InnoSuisse. Elle a été la directrice et responsable académique de l'équipe suisse et son projet NeighborHub, qui a gagné la compétition U.S. Solar Decathlon 2017 avec 8 podiums sur 10 épreuves. Elle est membre du Conseil de la Fondation LafargeHolcim pour la construction durable et dirige son Comité Académique. Elle est également membre du conseil éditorial de la revue scientifique Building and Environment chez Elsevier ainsi que des revues LEUKOS (de la Illuminating Engineering Society) et Buildings and Cities chez Taylor et Francis. Elle est Experte pour le Conseil d'Innovation InnoSuisse ainsi que membre fondatrice et membre du Conseil de la Fondation Culture du Bâti (CUB). Elle est aussi membre fondatrice de la Daylight Academy et membre active de plusieurs comités de l'Illuminating Engineering Society (IES) et de la Commission Internationale de l'Eclairage (CIE).
Auke Ijspeert
Auke 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.
Stefano Spaccapietra
Stefano Spaccapietra is a full professor at EPFL, Switzerland, where he has been heading the database laboratory. He has been in academic positions all along his career. He got his PhD from the University of Paris VI, in 1978, where he first had his master in Computer Science in 1969. At that time, he has been teaching file systems, later turned into teaching database systems. He moved to the University of Burgundy, Dijon, in 1983 to take a professor position at the Institute of Technology. He left Dijon for EPFL in 1988.
Prof. Spaccapietra is a Fellow of the IEEE and recipient of the IFIP Silver Core Award and ER Award. He is an ER fellow.
He has been Editor-in-chief of the Journal of Data Semantics (LNCS subline), Springer.
He is member of the editorial boards of the Data and Knowledge Engineering Journal (Elsevier), the
Internet and Web Information Systems Journal (Kluwer), the Revue Internationale de Géomatique (Hermes), and the Computing Letters Journal (CoLe), VSP/Brill.
He was former Chair of the IFIP Working Group 2.6 "Databases" and of the ER Conferences Steering Committee.
Henry Markram
Henry 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.
Vassily Hatzimanikatis
Dr. Vassily Hatzimanikatis is currently Associate Professor of Chemical Engineering and Bioengineering at Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL), in Lausanne, Switzerland. Vassily received a PhD and an MS in Chemical Engineering from the California Institute of Technology, and his Diploma in Chemical Engineering from the University of Patras, in Greece. After the completion of his doctoral studies, he held a research group leader position at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETHZ), Switzerland. Prior to joining EPFL, Vassily worked for three years in DuPont, Cargill, and Cargill Dow, and he has been assistant professor at Northwestern University, at Illinois, USA.
Vassilys research interests are in the areas of computational systems biology, biotechnology, and complexity. He is associate editor of the journals Biotechnology & Bioengineering, Metabolic Engineering and Integrative Biology, and he serves on the editorial advisory board of the journals Bioprocess and Biosystems Engineering, Journal of Chemical Technology and Biotechnology, and Industrial Biotechnology. He has written over 70 technical publications and he is co-inventor in three patents and patent applications.
Vassily is a fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (2010), he was a DuPont Young Professor (2001-2004), and he has also received the Jay Bailey Young Investigator Award in Metabolic Engineering (2000), and the ACS Elmar Gaden Award (2011).