Scientific Advisory Board

Ezio Biglieri was born in Aosta (Italy). He received his formal training in Electrical Engineering at Politecnico di Torino (Italy), where he received his Dr. Engr. degree in 1967. He is presently an Adjunct Professor of Electrical Engineering at University of California Los Angeles (UCLA). Previously he was a Professor at the University of Napoli (Italy), at Politecnico di Torino, at Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain, and at UCLA. He has held visiting positions with the Department of System Science, UCLA, the Mathematical Research Center, Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill, NJ, the Bell Laboratories, Holmdel, NJ, the Department of Electrical Engineering, UCLA, the Telecommunication Department of The Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Télécommunications, Paris, France, the University of Sydney, Australia, the Yokohama National University, Japan, the Electrical Engineering Department of Princeton University, the University of South Australia, Adelaide, the University of Melbourne, the Institute for Communications Engineering, Munich Institute of Technology, Germany, and the Institute for Infocomm Research, National University of Singapore.

He was elected three times to the Board of Governors of the IEEE Information Theory Society, and he served as its President in 1999. He is the Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory and of the Journal of Communications and Netowrks.

Among other honors, in 2000 he received the IEEE Third-Millennium Medal and the IEEE Donald G. Fink Prize Paper Award, in 2001 the IEEE Communications Society Edwin Howard Armstrong Achievement Award and a Best Paper Award from WPMC'01, Aalborg, Denmark, and in 2004 the Journal of Communications and Networks Best Paper Award.

Expertise

• Information theory
• Wireless communications
• Networking

Louis Laurent is working at the French Agency for Food, Environmental and Occupational Health and Safety (ANSES).

After his PHD thesis in 1983, Louis Laurent joins the French Atomic Energy Commission (CEA) to work in the field of controlled thermonuclear fusion. During 12 years he is involved in various fields such as plasma theory, tokamak experiments, instrumentation. In 1995, he joins the Department of Research on Condensed State, Atoms and Molecules located in Saclay and is appointed the head of this department in 2000. The main activities of these laboratories are fundamental research in the field of condensed matter physics including nanoscience and also co developments with industry. At this time, he is also the co-chairman of the committee in charge of the NSIT forward look of the European Science Foundation (nanoscience and information technology). In 2005, Louis Laurent joins the French National Research Agency and is appointed head of the department of information science (nanotechnology, computer science). Between 2009 and 2011, he participates to the project “campus Paris- Saclay “ , before joining ANSES at the end of 2011. Since 2002, Louis Laurent devotes himself to an activity of thinking about the impact of nanosciences, converging technologies or IST on society and more generally the relations between science and society. He wrote three books and took part to various TV and radio programmes on this topic.

Expertise

• Science management
• Information technology
• Links between science, society and risks

With a background in maths (Ecole Normale Supérieure, Agrégation of Mathematics), Dr. Michèle Sebag went to industry (Thomson-CSF, now Thales) where she started to learn about computer science, project management, and Artificial Intelligence (AI). Michèle Sebag got really interested in AI, became Consulting Engineer, and realized that Machine Learning was something to be. She was offered the opportunity to start research on Machine Learning for applications in Numerical Engineering, specifically Mechanics of Solids, at Laboratoire de Mécanique des Solides at Ecole Polytechnique. Dr. Sebag passed her PhD in between Machine Learning (LRI, Université Paris-Sud Orsay), Data Analysis (Ceremade, Université Paris-10 Dauphine) and Mechanics (LMS, Ecole Polytechnique), and she entered CNRS (CR1, 1991). In 2001, Michèle Sebag went to LRI, Université Paris-Sud as head of the Inference and Apprentissage research group, founded by Yves Kodratoff. In 2003, she founded together with Marc Schoenauer the research group TAO, Apprentissage and Optimization at INRIA.

Expertise

• Machine Learning for Cognitive Systems
• Evolutionary Computation for Complex Systems

Prof. Dr. Tommaso Calarco acts as Chairman of the Scientific Advisory Board of CHIST-ERA.

He is Full Professor of Quantum Information Processing at the University of Ulm in Germany since 2009. Prof. Tommaso Calarco graduated from University of Padua and got his PhD at University of Ferrara. His scientific career includes postdoc position at the University of Innsbruck, Marie-Curie Felllow of the EU at Harvard University and Fulbright Fellow at the Joint Quantum Institute in Maryland. He also worked at ECT* in Trento and BEC-INFM, Trento. He is currently director of the Institute for Quantum Information Processing at the University of Ulm. He is author of several visible publications on implementing quantum information with atoms, ions and molecules, where he proposes and analyzes various schemes for entangling atoms in a controlled way, e.g. in the context of cold collisions between neutral atoms and Rydberg atoms. His recent works are closely related to understanding limits of our control on the matter and getting to this limit experimentally. His work is closely coupled to experimental developments, and his understanding of experiments and collaboration with experimental groups always has been an important feature of his work. In addition he acts now as a coordinator the European roadmap for quantum information processing.

Expertise

• Foundations of quantum science
• Complex quantum systems: from quantum networks to quantum simulators
• Light-matter interface
• Tailored quantum states of matter