Speakers & biographies

Vice-President & CIO, EPFL; Professor, Department of Computer and Communication Sciences

«The (accelerated) digital transformation»

Edouard Bugnion joined EPFL in 2012, where his focus is on datacenter systems. He is also the academic co-director of the Swiss Data Science Center, a national initiative to accelerate the use of data science throughout Swiss academia. Since January 2017, he is also the Vice-President ad Interim of Information Systems of EPFL. Before joining EPFL, Edouard spent 18 years in the US, where he studied at Stanford and co-founded two startups: VMware and Nuova Systems (acquired by Cisco). At VMware from 1998 until 2005, he played many roles including CTO. At Nuova/Cisco from 2005 until 2011, he helped build the core engineering team and became the VP/CTO of Cisco’s Server, Access, and Virtualization Technology Group, a group that brought to market Cisco’s Unified Computing System (UCS) platform for virtualized datacenters.Together with his colleagues, he received the ACM Software System Award for VMware 1.0 in 2009. His paper Disco: Running Commodity Operating Systems on Scalable Multiprocessors" received a Best Paper Award at SOSP '97 and was entered into the ACM SIGOPS Hall of Fame Award in 2008. At EPFL, he received the OSDI 2014 Best Paper Award for his work on the IX dataplane operating system. Edouard Bugnion is also an independent Board member of Logitech and of Innosuisse.

Program manager «Scientific Information» for swissuniversities

«Welcoming address»

Since 2013, Roland Dietlicher is the program manager for the funding program "Scientific information: Access, processing and safeguarding" of swissuniversities (www.swissuniversities.ch/isci). The program promotes the development of national solutions in the field of digital scientific information. It is intended to build a service network for Swiss Academia, which provides easy access to publications and data, and at the same time offers tools for their processing and storage. In addition Roland Dietlicher is a member of the management board of the ETH IT Services department and works on strategic projects. Prior to his mandate as program manager, he headed the User Services section. His area of expertise includes IT service management and operations.

Project manager «SCALE-UP» project for SWITCH

«Infrastructure and services to SCALE UP your research to the next level!»

Patrik Schnellmann is currently working as Cloud Project Manager at SWITCH. obtained a Master of Sciences in Computer Sciences as well as a Master of Advanced Studies in Management, Technology, and Economics at ETH Zurich. Before he joined SWITCH in 2004, he worked in the financial services industry as well as the federal government.

Team leader «Infrastructure and Data» for SWITCH

Jens-Christian Fischer is the Team lead for the “Infrastructure and Data” team at SWITCH and the product owner of SWITCHengines. He has worked on the original architecture of both SWITCHdrive and SWITCHengines. Experienced Application Architect and Implementor with strong development and sysadmin skills. Worked as CEO and CTO of various startups.

Deputy CIO, in charge of the Information, Communication, and Educational Technology (ICET) Unit at the Information System Division of the University of Geneva, DLCM project director.

«Manage your research data: it's worth it !»

 The ICET unit focuses on Teaching and Learning, Research, and Collaboration. Pierre-Yves Burgi received the B.S. degree in computer engineering from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Lausanne, Switzerland, in 1986, and the Ph.D. degree in computer science from the University of Geneva in 1992. Pierre-Yves Burgi's interests include innovation in learning/teaching technologies (from 2012 to 2016 he chaired the Swiss Educational Technology Working Group), digital copyrights in education (he is an active member of the Swiss CCDL project), research data life-cycle management (he is heading the Swiss DLCM CUS P-2 project), and digital humanities (he is part of the Bodmerlab team).

Senior software engineer at the university of Geneva.

He writes: After an engineering degree in Computer Science, I worked in different software companies during the last 20 years. I used to introduce and to use agile methodologies in developing software. In the last decade, I acquired a good expertise in archiving & record management domain. Today, I'm participating to DLCM project (ww.dlcm.ch) to design and build the solution to preserve Swiss research data.

EnhanceR project director, University of Zurich

«Enhancing research through IT expertise»

Sergio Maffioletti is the EnhanceR project director. He works as Infrastructure and Application specialist at S3IT: Service and Support for Science IT unit at the University of Zurich. He has more than 10 years of experience in providing specialized IT support and solutions for the swiss academic community.

HSR Hochschule für Technik Rapperswil

«geodata4edu.ch»

«geodata4edu.ch – Establishing a national service for the central access to geodata for research and teaching at Swiss universities»

Dirk Engelke is professor for spatial development at HSR. One focus of his research is the impact of digitization on spatial development. He is project leader of HSR Webservices for geodata4edu.ch.

Executive Director - Scientific IT and Application Support, EPFL

«c4science – Tools for reproducible in silico research»

Graduated in mathematics at EPFL after having spent one exchange year at Carnegie Mellon University in the US, she decided to engage in a PhD thesis in scientifing computing at EPFL. While doing her PhD studies, she took care of the computing facilities in her lab, including the administration of the cluster of the Analysis and Scientific Computing Institute. She is founder and former president of the GNU Generation, a student association promoting free software. After her PhD she obtained a position as HPC expert and assistant manager at the Basic Sciences Faculty at EPFL and then as the HPC Coordinator for EPFL. She is now the Executive Director of the Scientific IT and Application Support Center at EPFL.

Executive Director Swiss Data Science Center (SDSC)

Swiss Data Science Center (SDSC)

Olivier Verscheure received his Ph.D. degree in computer science from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Lausanne (EPFL), in June 1999. In July 1999 Olivier joined the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center, NY as a full member of the research staff, and managed the Exploratory Stream Analytics research group from 2007 to 2010. In July 2010 Olivier transferred to the IBM Research lab in Ireland, where he played a major role in the formation of the new lab. He led a large team of research managers, researchers and software engineers in the multidisciplinary field of Data Science, working on challenging real-world problems in close collaboration with the industry at large and the public sector. Since May 2016 Olivier is the Director of the newly created Swiss Data Science Center. Olivier received two IBM Outstanding Technical Achievement Awards, published over 100 research papers in top international venues, two of which were awarded Best Paper, and invented more than 40 US and international patents.

 Coordinator of the training and e-learning activities of GARR, Italy

«Providing e-learning services for Ital»

Gabriella Paolini coordinates the training and e-learning activities of GARR, the Italian NREN. She's coordinating GARR's activities in the European project "UP2University" and managing relationship with the community of schools connected to the GARR network. She coordinated the activities of the "Progress in training" training project. She is also a digital literacy trainer. In particular, she's handling  the "Conoscere Internet" initiative, carried out by GARR in collaboration with the AssoProvider Association. She is an ICT technician, a digital arts and entertainments enthusiast and a mom.
www.garr.it / www.up2university.eu / www.progressintraining.it / www.conoscereinternet.it

Program Manager at the Swiss Data Science Center (SDSC)

«Scientific Datapools for computation in the cloud»

Sofiane Sarni, next to being the Program Manager at the Swiss Data Science Center, is also a senior member of the research staff. Sofiane received his Ph.D. degree in computer science from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Lausanne (EPFL), in May 2006. He has previously occupied positions at the border between management and science and led many projects applied to domains as varied as medicine, finance, environmental sciences, and scientific computing. His expertise and research interests include: stream processing, large scale data management, scientific and data visualization, cloud computing and information technology. 

Coordinator Faculty Science IT Support / Dozent, Mathematisches Institut, University of Berne

«High Performance on SWITCHengines for High Energy Physics»

Sigve Haug studied physics in Germany, Spain and Norway. He has been involved in neutrino physics experiments and high energy frontier experiments, often with main focus on the computing challenges related to the large and distributed data from these experiments. Today he is working for the University of Bern, coordinating science IT and data science support, trainings and projects.

Manager of Operations, MetaMedia Center (MMC), EPFL

«The Montreux Jazz Digital Project»

Alain Dufaux's field of expertise is in Digital Signal Processing for audio, with a dual profile in both academic (PhD in automatic sound recognition in 2001, lecturer & co-director for PhD students since 2007) and industrial worlds (low-power DSP specialist in the hearing aid industry during 6 years). He presently acts as the Operation and Development Manager at the Metamedia Center of EPFL.

Find out more about Alain’s rich and varied career at https://people.epfl.ch/cgi-bin/people?id=175547&op=bio&lang=en&cvlang=en.