Meet your Program Directors

EPFL professor David Atienza is an expert on the next-generation embedded systems for the Internet of Things, working for last 10 years on smart wearables both for humans and a wider range of other objects including cars. He focuses on how these objects can interact with each other to create new business opportunities – helping businesses be ready for these opportunities. His expertise also covers 2D/3D thermal modeling and management for multiprocessor system-on-chip, electronic design automation, wireless body sensor networks, memory optimizations, low-power hardware and software co-design.

Auke Ijspeert is a full professor at EPFL and head of the Biorobotics Laboratory (BioRob). He has a PhD in artificial intelligence from the University of Edinburgh (1999) and has been at EPFL since 2002. His research interests are at the intersection between robotics, computational neuroscience, nonlinear dynamical systems and applied machine learning. He is interested in using numerical simulations and robots to gain a better understanding of animal locomotion, and in using inspiration from biology to design novel types of mobile, walking robots and locomotion controllers. He is also investigating how to assist persons with limited mobility using exoskeletons and assistive furniture.

Named on the Thinkers50 Radar 2022 list of up-and-coming global thought leaders, Öykü Işık helps businesses to tackle cybersecurity, data privacy, and digital ethics challenges, and enables CEOs and other executives to understand these issues, which she believes are too important to be left to technical specialists alone.

Professor Rachid Guerraoui’s current research at EPFL is devoted to concurrent and distributed computing, from multiprocessors to wide-area networks.