Keynote Speakers

Albert-László Barabási - Alain Berthoz - Henrik Ehrsson - Ehud Shapiro - Viviane Reding - Henry Markram - Jeannette M. Wing - Anton Zeilinger

Albert-László Barabási, Northeastern University, Boston, USA

Albert-László Barabási is a Distinguished University Professor at Northeastern University where he directs the Center for Complex Network Research. He also holds appointments in Departments of Physics, Computer Science, Biology, and Medicine at Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women Hospital.

A Hungarian born native of Transylvania, Romania, he received his Masters in Theoretical Physics at the Eötvös University in Budapest, Hungary and was awarded a Ph.D. at Boston University. Barabási is the author of "Linked: The New Science of Networks", the co-author of "Fractal Concepts in Surface Growth" (Cambridge, 1995), and the co-editor of "The Structure and Dynamics of Networks" (Princeton, 2005). His work leads to the discovery of scale-free networks in 1999, and proposed the Barabasi-Albert model to explain their widespread emergence in natural, technological and social systems, from the cellular telephone to the WWW or online communities.

Barabási is a Fellow of the American Physical Society. In 2005 he was awarded the FEBS Anniversary Prize for Systems Biology and in 2006 the John von Neumann Medal by the John von Neumann Computer Society from Hungary, for outstanding achievements in computer-related science and technology. In 2004 he was elected into the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and in 2007 into the Academia Europaea.

Alain Berthoz, Collège de France, Paris, France

Alain Berthoz is a distinguished neurophysiologist. His main fields of research are the physiology of sensori-motor functions and more specifically the oculo-motor system, the vestibular system, balance control, and movement perception.

He was born in 1939 and was educated as a civil engineer in the "Ecole des Mines" (Paris) (1963). He is a doctor in engineering (1966) and in natural science (1973) and he worked as a researcher in the French CNRS (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique) between 1981 and 1993. Since 1993 Alain Berthoz is a professor at the Collège de France and director of the joint research centre of CNRS and Collège de France "Physiology of perception and action" which he created himself. Since 2007 he is the director of the neuro-informatics programme at the CNRS. He directed several programmes for the French ministry of Research, among which the Cognitive and neurosciences integrative and computation.

Alain Berthoz has worked on the neural basis of vision's control and has proposed as a result of his numerous works a global hierarchic theory of vision's setting up. He made major discoveries about the vestibular system and the visual perception of movement. He also participated in the first scientific experiments on spaceships to study the effects of weightlessness on sensori-motor functions. This allowed him to demonstrate that the brain uses internal models of Newton's law, a prerequisite to explain its motor anticipation capacity.

H. Henrik Ehrsson, Karolinska Institute, Stockholm, Sweden

Born in Sweden in 1972, Henrik Ehrsson is a medical doctor and neuroscientist by training (M.D., Ph.D.) He worked as a research scientist at University College London and he is now a senior lecturer and research group leader at the Department of Neuroscience at the Karolinska Institute, Stockholm, Sweden.

Ehrsson has published over 30 articles on how we perceive our own bodies and how we control our bodily movements. His current research addresses the fundamental questions of how we recognize that our limbs are part of our own body, and why we feel that one’s self is located inside the body. Erhsson's labs' main goal is "to identify the multisensory mechanisms whereby the central nervous system distinguishes between sensory signals from one's body and from the environment. The long term goal is to develop a physiology-based model of the central representation of one's body".

Dr. Ehrsson’s work has been widely cited in the international press including articles in the New York Times, Der Spiegel, The Economist, National Geographic, and the Times, and television appearances on Channel 4 and ABC News Good Morning America.

Henry Markram, Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland

Previously working at the Weizmann Institute of Science, the NIH, UCSF, and the Max Planck Institute in Heidelberg (Germany), Henry Markram is the founder of the Brain Mind Institute (BMI) at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) and director of the Blue Brain Project.

Among other major scientific results, Markram discovered the three fundamental principles of synaptic learning in the brain: The first is called Spike Timing Dependent Plasticity (STDP) where the relevance of each of the 10' of thousands of inputs to neurons is judged with millisecond water-shed precision - and rewarded or punished accordingly. The second is called Redistribution of Synaptic Efficacy (RSE) where the content of information transfered by each synapse in the brain is tuned to allow neurons to extract the correct information from their neighbors. The third is called Long-Term Microcircuit Plasticity (LTMP) where the brain rewires itself in response to an experience so that the circuitry is better structured to absorb and store new information. Markram has derived the blue prints of the elementary microcircuit of the neocortex, and reconstituted and simulated this unit on supercomputers.

Building on his renowned multidisciplinary experience as a neuroscientist he founded the BMI in 2002, which now has over 200 researchers. There he also leads the Blue Brain Project that is aimed at building a simulation-based research facility capable of constructing models of the brain with as much biological realism as experimental data and knowledge allows. He also runs an experimental lab that uses state-of-the-art tools to reverse engineer the brain. Markram has published over 100 scientific papers.

Viviane Reding, European Commission, Brussels, Belgium

Viviane Reding is the European Commissioner for Information, Society and Media in the Barroso Commission since 2004. Originally from Luxembourg she earned a doctorate in Human Sciences at the Sorbonne (Paris) and worked as a journalist for over twenty years. She was an editorial writer for the Luxemburger Wort, Luxemburg main newspaper, and she was also the President of Luxembourg Union of Journalists.

Viviane Reding first pursued a political career at national level as a Member of Parliament and as a city counsellor. She became a Member of the European Parliament in 1989 where she headed the Petition Committee and she was vice-president of the Social Committee and the Civil Liberties and Home Affairs Committee. She was also the head of Luxembourg delegation to EPP. Viviane Reding was appointed as a Member of the European Commission in 1999 (Culture, Education, Youth, Media and Sports) in the Prodi Commission.

Among other distinctions she was awarded the Gold Medal of European Merit in 2001 and the Robert Shuman Medal in 2004 and she was made Officer of the French Légion d'honneur in 2005. Viviane Reding is a Doctor Honoris Causa from the Hu Chen University of Taiwan and the Universities of Torina and Genoa.

Ehud Shapiro, Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, Israel

Ehud Shapiro founded and served as the CEO of Ubique Ltd., an internet software pioneer. Building on "Concurrent Prolog", a project aimed at developing a high-level programming language for parallel and distributed computer systems, he developed "Virtual Places," a precursor to today's widely-used Instant Messaging systems.

Currently, Shapiro is leading research projects at the interface of computer science and molecular biology at the Weizmann Institute of Science, where he attempts to build a computer from biological molecules; a computer that would operate inside the living body, programmed with medical knowledge to diagnose diseases and produce the requisite drugs.

In other projects, he designed an effective method of synthesizing error-free DNA molecules from error-prone building blocks and developed a biological model that may explain the root cause of genetic disorders such as Huntington disease. He has also developed a method for tracing the “genealogy” of cells in the human body, an approach that is being used to investigate fundamental questions in biology and medicine, recently providing the most conclusive evidence to date that cancer originates from a single cell of a mature organism. For this work Shapiro received the 2004 World Technology Network Award in Biotechnology and was a member of the 2004 "Scientific American 50" as Research Leader in Nanotechnology.

Jeannette M. Wing, National Science Foundation, Arlington, USA

Jeannette M. Wing is the assistant director for Computer & Information Science and Engineering (CISE) at the US National Science Foundation. Wing earned bachelor's and master's degrees in electrical engineering and computer science in 1979, and a doctorate in computer science in 1983 at MIT. She began her career as an assistant professor at the University of Southern California and joined the Carnegie Mellon faculty in 1985. She has worked or consulted for a great number of laboratories or private companies.

In research, Wing is an international leader in the area of formal methods--the use of mathematical models and logics to specify and reason about computing systems. Wing and her colleagues have made fundamental contributions to many areas of computer science, including abstract data types, object-oriented programming, concurrent systems and fault-tolerant distributed systems. More recently, she has turned her attention to trustworthy computing with a focus on software security.

Wing is the author or co-author of more than 100 peer-reviewed publications she has been or is on the editorial boards of nine scientific journals, including the Journal of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). She is a member of the National Academies of Sciences' Computer Science and Telecommunications Board and Microsoft's Trustworthy Computing Academic Advisory Board. She is an elected member-at-large on the ACM Council. She has also served on many advisory boards including those for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and NSF.

Anton Zeilinger, University of Vienna, Austria

Anton Zeilinger is internationally recognized as a scientific leader in the foundations of quantum mechanics and as one of the founders of the field of quantum information science. The most important stages in his career of include the Technical University of Vienna, M.I.T., the Technical University of Munich, the University of Innsbruck, the Collège de France and the Austrian Academy of Sciences.

He started his works in the 1970's on the foundations of quantum mechanics with neutron interferometry and quantum entanglement in which his most significant contribution is the discovery of what is today called "GHZ states" and their experimental realization. In the late 1980's, together with Greenberger and Horne, he wrote the first paper ever on entanglement beyond two particles. In the 1990's he took the opportunity to start two lines of research: one concerned entangled photons, the other atom optics. Later he started experiments with very complex and massive macro-molecules. The successful demonstration of quantum interference for C60 and C70 molecules in 1999 opened up a very active field of research. With entangled photons, the main focuses of Anton Zeilinger’s research since 2000 were all-optical quantum computation, the development of entanglement-based quantum cryptography systems, and experiments with entangled photon pairs over very large distances. In 2005, Zeilinger with his group again started a new field, the quantum physics of mechanical cantilevers. They were the first to demonstrate experimentally the self-cooling of a micro-mirror by radiation pressure, that is, without feedback.

Anton Zeilinger’s international awards include the King Faisal Prize of Science and the Newton Medal of the Institute of Physics.