Wulfram GerstnerWulfram Gerstner is Director of the Laboratory of Computational Neuroscience LCN at the EPFL. His research in computational neuroscience concentrates on models of spiking neurons and spike-timing dependent plasticity, on the problem of neuronal coding in single neurons and populations, as well as on the link between biologically plausible learning rules and behavioral manifestations of learning. He teaches courses for Physicists, Computer Scientists, Mathematicians, and Life Scientists at the EPFL. After studies of Physics in Tübingen and at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich (Master 1989), Wulfram Gerstner spent a year as a visiting researcher in Berkeley. He received his PhD in theoretical physics from the Technical University Munich in 1993 with a thesis on associative memory and dynamics in networks of spiking neurons. After short postdoctoral stays at Brandeis University and the Technical University of Munich, he joined the EPFL in 1996 as assistant professor. Promoted to Associate Professor with tenure in February 2001, he is since August 2006 a full professor with double appointment in the School of Computer and Communication Sciences and the School of Life Sciences. Wulfram Gerstner has been invited speaker at numerous international conferences and workshops. He has served on the editorial board of the Journal of Neuroscience, Network: Computation in Neural Systems',
Journal of Computational Neuroscience', and `Science'.
Alireza KarimiAlireza Karimi received his B. Sc. and M. Sc. degrees in Electrical Engineering in 1987 and 1990, respectively, from Amir Kabir University (Tehran Polytechnic). Then he received his DEA and Ph. D. degrees both on Automatic Control from Institut National Polytechnique de Grenoble (INPG) in 1994 and 1997, respectively. He was Assistant Professor at Electrical Engineering Department of Sharif University of Technology in Teheran from 1998 to 2000. Then he joined Automatic Laboratory of Swiss Federal Institute of Technology at Lausanne, Switzerland. He is currently Professor of Automatic Control and the head of "Data-Driven Modelling and Control" group. His research interests include data-driven controller tuning and robust control with application to mechatronic systems and electrical grids.