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 Pascal FuaPascal Fua received an engineering degree from Ecole Polytechnique, Paris, in 1984 and the Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from the University of Orsay in 1989. He then worked at SRI International and INRIA Sophia-Antipolis as a Computer Scientist. He joined EPFL in 1996 where he is now a Professor in the School of Computer and Communication Science and heads the Computer Vision Laboratory. His research interests include shape modeling and motion recovery from images, analysis of microscopy images, and Augmented Reality. His research interests include shape modeling and motion recovery from images, analysis of microscopy images, and machine learning. He has (co)authored over 300 publications in refereed journals and conferences. He is an IEEE Fellow and has been an Associate Editor of IEEE journal Transactions for Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence. He often serves as program committee member, area chair, and program chair of major vision conferences and has cofounded three spinoff companies (Pix4D, PlayfulVision, and NeuralConcept).
Roger HerschRoger D. Hersch is professor of Computer Science and head of the Peripheral Systems Laboratory at EPFL. He received his engineering degree from ETHZ in 1975, worked in industry from 1975 to 1980, and obtained his PhD degree from EPFL in 1985. He directed the widely known
Visible Human Web Server project
, which offers a number of services for the visualization of human anatomy.
His current research focuses on color reproduction, spectral color prediction models, moiré imaging, and visual document security. Recent achievements include the PhotoProtect technology, which incorporates text as chromatic differences in order to protect identity photographs (Swiss driving license), microstructure imaging, which is used by railways companies (SNCF, RENFE) and festival organizers (Paleo) to print tickets at home and the band moire imaging technology for the protection of security documents.
Heinz HügliHeinz Hügli est professeur honoraire à l'Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL). Il a été directeur de recherches et professeur associé à l'Institut de Microtechnique de l'Université de Neuchâtel, Suisse, où il était chargé d'un enseignement et dirigeait le Laboratoire de Reconnaissance des Formes. De 1988 à 2008, ce laboratoire a conduit des recherches dans les domaines de la vision par ordinateur, avec un accent particulier sur la vision précoce, l'inspection industrielle, la modélisation et la reconnaissance d'objets 3D. Heinz Hügli est ingénieur diplômé de l'Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Zurich (EPFZ) où il obtint aussi son titre de docteur en sciences techniques. Il a travaillé cinq ans dans le cadre du groupe de traitement des images à l'EPFZ et deux ans avec le Medical Imaging Science Group, University of Southern California. En 1982, il rejoint l'Université de Neuchâtel, Suisse, où il conduisit des recherches dans le domaine du traitement de la parole avant de créer le Laboratoire de reconnaissance des formes (PARLAB). Il a enseigné à l'Université de Neuchâtel, l'Université de Berne et l'EPFL. Auteur de plus de 150 publications scientifiques, il a présidé des conférences internationales, a été membre de plusieurs socités scientifiques et a participé aux comités de programmes de nombreuses conférences.
Sabine SüsstrunkProf. Dr. Sabine Süsstrunk leads the Image and Visual Representation Lab in the School of Computer and Communication Sciences (IC) at EPFL since 1999. From 2015-2020, she was also the first Director of the Digital Humanities Institute (DHI), College of Humanities (CdH). Her main research areas are in computational photography, computational imaging, color image processing and computer vision, machine learning, and computational image quality and aesthetics. Sabine has authored and co-authored over 200 publications, of which 7 have received best paper/demo awards, and holds over 10 patents. Sabine served as chair and/or committee member in many international conferences on image processing, computer vision, and image systems engineering. She is President of the Swiss Science Council SSC, Founding Member and Member of the Board (President 2014-2018) of the EPFL-WISH (Women in Science and Humanities) Foundation, Member of the Board of the SRG SSR (Swiss Radio and Television Corporation), and Member of the Board of Largo Films. She received the IS&T/SPIE 2013 Electronic Imaging Scientist of the Year Award for her contributions to color imaging, computational photography, and image quality, and the 2018 IS&T Raymond C. Bowman and the 2020 EPFL AGEPoly IC Polysphere Awards for excellence in teaching. Sabine is a Fellow of IEEE and IS&T.
Mark PaulyMark Pauly is a full professor at the School of Computer and Communication Sciences at EPFL. Prior to joining EPFL, he was assistant professor at the CS department of ETH Zurich since April 2005. From August 2003 to March 2005 he was a postdoctoral scholar at Stanford University, where he also held a position as visiting assistant professor during the summer of 2005. He received his Ph.D. degree (with distinction) in 2003 from ETH Zurich and his M.S. degree (with highest honors) in 1999 from TU Kaiserslautern. His research interests include computer graphics and animation, shape modeling and analysis, geometry processing, architectural geometry, and digital fabrication. He received the ETH medal for outstanding dissertation, was awarded the Eurographics Young Researcher Award in 2006 and the Eurographics Outstanding Technical Contributions Award in 2016.
Jean-Philippe ThiranJean-Philippe Thiran was born in Namur, Belgium, in August 1970. He received the Electrical Engineering degree and the PhD degree from the Université catholique de Louvain (UCL), Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium, in 1993 and 1997, respectively. From 1993 to 1997, he was the co-ordinator of the medical image analysis group of the Communications and Remote Sensing Laboratory at UCL, mainly working on medical image analysis. Dr Jean-Philippe Thiran joined the Signal Processing Institute (ITS) of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL), Lausanne, Switzerland, in February 1998 as a senior lecturer. He was promoted to Assistant Professor in 2004, to Associate Professor in 2011 and is now a Full Professor since 2020. He also holds a 20% position at the Department of Radiology of the University of Lausanne (UNIL) and of the Lausanne University Hospital (CHUV) as Associate Professor ad personam. Dr Thiran's current scientific interests include
Computational medical imaging: acquisition, reconstruction and analysis of imaging data, with emphasis on regularized linear inverse problems (compressed sensing, convex optimization). Applications to medical imaging: diffusion MRI, ultrasound imaging, inverse planning in radiotherapy, etc.Computer vision & machine learning: image and video analysis, with application to facial expression recognition, eye tracking, lip reading, industrial inspection, medical image analysis, etc.
Wenzel Alban JakobI am an assistant professor leading the Realistic Graphics Lab at EPFL's School of Computer and Communication Sciences. I completed my Ph.D. at the Department of Computer Science at Cornell University, where I was advised by Steve Marschner. Before coming to EPFL, I was a Marie Curie postdoctoral fellow at ETH Zürich's Interactive Geometry Lab where I worked with Olga Sorkine-Hornung.
Henry MarkramHenry 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.
