Management
Prof. Andrea Cavallaro
Director
Prof. Andrea Cavallaro is Director of the Idiap Research Institute and Full Professor at EPFL. He is a Fellow of the International Association for Pattern Recognition for “contributions to image processing and multi-sensor scene understanding,” and a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. He serves as Editor-in-Chief of Signal Processing: Image Communication, as Senior Area Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, and as member of the Technical Directions Board of the IEEE Signal Processing Society.
His research interests are machine learning for multi-modal perception, computer vision, audio processing, and information privacy. His research goal is to create the next-generation machine perception models for the effective use of sensory data, and the safe operation of intelligent systems that gain information about their environment and make decisions autonomously or in partnership with humans.
Dr. François Foglia
Deputy Director
Dr. François Foglia has a PhD in Computational Chemistry (Molecular Dynamic Simulations Studies; Prof. André Merbach, EPFL) and an MBA from Barcelona Tech UPC, Spain . After having worked in Edipresse Publications SA as Technical Manager for its internet department (Edicom) and in SHR Technologies — a company specialized in the European development of Israeli tech start-ups — as Technical Director, he was involved in the conception of an e-health portal, as associate and CTO. He went on to work in Spain for Nortel Networks, in one of its R&D departments (3rd generation mobile telephony market), and later was involved — in a managerial role — in large IT and security projects in an Accenture company.
He joined Idiap Research Institute early in 2006 as program manager in charge of, among other matters, the National Centre of Competence in Research (NCCR) IM2. In 2009, he became adjunct to the Director. In 2012, he was promoted, becoming Idiap Deputy Director and Director of Ideark SA, an incubator that builds bridges between research findings and tech industry.
Christophe Rossa
Financial Director
Born in Martigny, Christophe Rossa has diploma in economy from the University of Applied Sciences and Arts Western Switzerland. He also spent two years in Zurich to learn German. After his first professional experiences in the JM Rossa SA company and in the City of Martigny, he spent 10 years managing various casinos' finances, accounting and administration in Montreux, Fribourg and Chamonix.
He joined the institute in 2019 and formally integrated Idiap's management in 2021.