Advanced LLM Applications and Agentic Systems - Training at EPFL

Nora earned her Ph.D. in Computer Science/Bioinformatics from the University of Tübingen, where she focused on the in silico design of peptide-based vaccines using combinatorial optimization and machine learning. During her postdoctoral fellowship at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York, and later as a staff scientist at the New York Genome Center, she worked on metagenomics, infectious diseases, and cancer. In 2015, Nora joined NEXUS Personalized Health Technologies at ETH Zurich where her focus shifted towards the management of clinical and biomedical research data. In May 2024, she joined the Swiss Data Science Center as Head of Biomedical Data Science.

Anna joined SDSC as a Data Scientist focusing on industry collaborations in July 2019. She completed her PhD in Bioinformatics at the University of Luxembourg, where she analysed large-scale heterogeneous datasets and leveraged multiple disciplines: Statistics, Network Analysis, and Machine Learning. Before joining SDSC, Anna worked as a Data Scientist at Deloitte Luxembourg, with a focus on computer vision and time-series analysis.Currently, Anna is a Principal Data Scientist based at the ETH Zurich office, where she leads biomedical collaborations with industry partners. Anna works on a range of projects: protein properties prediction, biomanufacturing optimization, statistical model evaluation and others.

Guillaume Obozinski graduated with a PhD in Statistics from UC Berkeley in 2009. He did his postdoc and held until 2012 a researcher position in the Willow and Sierra teams at INRIA and Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris. He was then Research Faculty at Ecole des Ponts ParisTech until 2018. Guillaume has broad interests in statistics and machine learning and worked over time on sparse modeling, optimization for large scale learning, graphical models, relational learning and semantic embeddings, with applications in various domains from computational biology to computer vision.

Snežana joined the SDSC industry team in June 2021 on a mission to advance adoption of modern data driven solutions in the domain of public health care. She has a background in experimental particle physics with a Diploma from the ETH Zurich and a PhD from the University of Geneva. Snežana pursued fundamental research in the field of high energy physics at CERN for nine years, harnessing the power of machine learning and statistical methods to uncover the traces of new physics in petabytes of proton-proton collision data and to develop innovative particle identification algorithms. Since 2018, Snežana served as a Data Science consultant, supporting partners from industries such as manufacturing, insurances, compliance services and online platforms in creating business value from internal and external data.

Marisol has a degree in Law and more than 15 years of experience working as a notary officer in Madrid. After relocating to Switzerland with her family, she obtained a certification to teach Spanish as a foreign language, dedicating four years to teaching Spanish online to students of all ages and backgrounds. Marisol has returned to her professional roots as an administrative assistant, joining the SDSC team in June 2023.

Saurabh Bhargava, joined the SDSC as a Principal Data Scientist in the Industry Cell at the Zürich office in 2022. Saurabh previously worked in the retail sector and the advertising industry in Germany. He lead and built various data products for customers using state of the art machine learning methods and industrializing them thereby adding value for the customers. He completed his PhD from ETH Zürich in June 2017 specializing in machine learning applications on Audio data. He obtained his Master’s and Bachelor’s degrees from EPFL and Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Roorkee, India in 2011 and 2009 respectively. His interests and expertise are in combining state of the art data science and data engineering tools for building scalable data products.

Christian joined the SDSC in July 2021 as a data scientist in the industry cell. Before that he worked at the Media Technology Center at ETH Zurich to develop new ML technology for their industry partners. He completed his Master's degree in Mathematics at ETH Zurich (2017) with focus on algorithmics and machine learning. After his studies he worked as a online marketing data analyst in the news publishing business. His expertise lies in statistics, NLP and software engineering.

Silvia holds an MSc in Computer Science from EPFL and a PhD in Computer Science from the University of York, UK. She has been a senior research fellow at the University of Trento and later at Politecnico di Milano, Italy. Here, she had the chance to work on Marie Curie and ERC projects relating to natural language processing. From 2012 to 2019, she was a Senior Manager and NLP expert at ELCA Informatique Switzerland, whose AI department she helped create and expand. Silvia joined the Swiss Data Science Center in 2019 and is currently its Chief Transformation Officer, in charge of the team leading organizations to digital transformation.

Saurabh Bhargava, joined the SDSC as a Principal Data Scientist in the Industry Cell at the Zürich office in 2022. Saurabh previously worked in the retail sector and the advertising industry in Germany. He lead and built various data products for customers using state of the art machine learning methods and industrializing them thereby adding value for the customers. He completed his PhD from ETH Zürich in June 2017 specializing in machine learning applications on Audio data. He obtained his Master’s and Bachelor’s degrees from EPFL and Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Roorkee, India in 2011 and 2009 respectively. His interests and expertise are in combining state of the art data science and data engineering tools for building scalable data products.

Nora earned her Ph.D. in Computer Science/Bioinformatics from the University of Tübingen, where she focused on the in silico design of peptide-based vaccines using combinatorial optimization and machine learning. During her postdoctoral fellowship at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York, and later as a staff scientist at the New York Genome Center, she worked on metagenomics, infectious diseases, and cancer. In 2015, Nora joined NEXUS Personalized Health Technologies at ETH Zurich where her focus shifted towards the management of clinical and biomedical research data. In May 2024, she joined the Swiss Data Science Center as Head of Biomedical Data Science.

Irene joined the SDSC in August 2024 as a Senior Biomedical Data Scientist. Trained as an evolutionary biologist, she worked in academic research in Switzerland and abroad before transitioning to bioinformatics, where she specialized in supporting researchers with the analysis of next generation sequencing data. At SDSC, her focus is on data engineering, management, and analysis of biomedical data.

Xinrui obtained her Ph.D. in Computer Science from ETH Zürich in 2022 under the supervision of Prof. Gunnar Rätsch. During her doctoral study, she was devoted to applying machine learning algorithms to solving healthcare problems. Xinrui also holds a M.Sc. degree in Electrical Engineering from EPFL in Switzerland and a B.Eng. degree in Electronic Information Science and Technology from Tsinghua University in China. Before joining the SDSC, Xinrui worked for the NEXUS Personalized Health Technologies platform at ETH Zürich.

Sebastian Salzmann is a molecular biologist and data scientist who holds an MSc degree in Molecular Health Science from ETH (2016) and Datascience (2024) from ZHAW.

After graduating from his first master he worked in the Analytical Chemistry department at the Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Sciences (Eawag) as a research software engineer in environmental massspectrometry.

With a mixed background in the molecular life sciences, chemistry and information technology he is joining SDSC as a Biomedical Data Engineer to apply his skills in the domains of data engineering, management and analysis of biomedical data.

Guillaume Obozinski graduated with a PhD in Statistics from UC Berkeley in 2009. He did his postdoc and held until 2012 a researcher position in the Willow and Sierra teams at INRIA and Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris. He was then Research Faculty at Ecole des Ponts ParisTech until 2018. Guillaume has broad interests in statistics and machine learning and worked over time on sparse modeling, optimization for large scale learning, graphical models, relational learning and semantic embeddings, with applications in various domains from computational biology to computer vision.

Prof. Olivier Verscheure is the director and founder of the Swiss Data Science Center (SDSC). Olivier also co-leads a joint training program between EPFL and HEC Lausanne, specifically designed for senior executives. Since 2018, Olivier has been a member of the Board of Directors of Lonza, a global leader in the life sciences sector. This company provides products and services to the pharmaceutical, biotechnology, and specialized healthcare industries.Olivier began his career at IBM Research after earning his Ph.D. in computer science from EPFL. He held several research and leadership positions at the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center in New York and co-created and co-directed the IBM Research center in Dublin, Ireland, before joining the EPFL in 2016.

Alessandro joined the SDSC in March 2019 as a data scientist focused on industry collaborations. His mission is to support corporates in leveraging the power of their data by adopting analytical approaches and data-centric solutions. His background is in biomedical engineering, with a PhD in neuroscience from the University of Tübingen. Before joining the center, he worked as a postdoc at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics, at the EPFL Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience in Geneva, and as data scientist for a private ecommerce company.

Valerio started his career working for 7 years as a particle-physics researcher at CERN. In 2016, he moved to consulting, applying data science in several industries. First, he joined the Quant team of Ernst & Young in Geneva. Later, he created his own company, SamurAI sàrl, providing consulting services for his clients. He also has a passion for teaching very complex subjects in simple terms. That is why he particularly enjoys offering training programs to private companies and universities. Valerio joined the SDSC in May 2022 as a Principal Data Scientist with the mission of accompanying industrial partners and other institutions through their data science journey.

Roberto holds an M.Sc. and a Ph.D. in Particle Physics from the University of Torino, Italy. He has worked for several years in fundamental research as a senior fellow and data scientist at the CERN Experimental Physics division and on a research project supported by the Belgian National Fund for Scientific Research (FNRS). In 2018 he moved to EPFL to work on data mining and Machine Learning techniques for the built environment and renewable energies. He has started and led multiple collaborations with academic and industry partners in the energy domain. Roberto joined the SDSC in September 2021 as a Principal Data Scientist with the mission of accompanying industries, NGOs and international organizations through their data science journey.

Silvia holds an MSc in Computer Science from EPFL and a PhD in Computer Science from the University of York, UK. She has been a senior research fellow at the University of Trento and later at Politecnico di Milano, Italy. Here, she had the chance to work on Marie Curie and ERC projects relating to natural language processing. From 2012 to 2019, she was a Senior Manager and NLP expert at ELCA Informatique Switzerland, whose AI department she helped create and expand. Silvia joined the Swiss Data Science Center in 2019 and is currently its Chief Transformation Officer, in charge of the team leading organizations to digital transformation.

Saurabh Bhargava, joined the SDSC as a Principal Data Scientist in the Industry Cell at the Zürich office in 2022. Saurabh previously worked in the retail sector and the advertising industry in Germany. He lead and built various data products for customers using state of the art machine learning methods and industrializing them thereby adding value for the customers. He completed his PhD from ETH Zürich in June 2017 specializing in machine learning applications on Audio data. He obtained his Master’s and Bachelor’s degrees from EPFL and Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Roorkee, India in 2011 and 2009 respectively. His interests and expertise are in combining state of the art data science and data engineering tools for building scalable data products.

Matthias Galipaud obtained his PhD in evolutionary biology in 2012 from the University of Burgundy in Dijon (France), and held postdoctoral positions as a mathematical biologist at the university of Bielefeld (Germany) and the university of Zurich, where he researched the evolutionary theories of aging and mate choice. In 2020, he became a data scientist, developing machine learning solutions for startups in Switzerland and Australia before joining the SDSC Innovation Team in November 2022.

Dan received an MSc in civil and environmental engineering from UC Berkeley and a Ph.D. from EPFL, where he developed models combining machine learning and geographic information systems to estimate renewable energy potentials on a large scale. After serving as a researcher/data scientist at Unisanté (Lausanne) and completing a one-year postdoc at the Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute (Mila) in Montréal, Dan joined the SDSC Innovation team. His work has generally been focusing on crafting and tailoring machine learning methods and deep learning architectures for a variety of domains, most notably the spatio-temporal modeling and forecasting of environmental and energy related variables, as well as multiple applications in public health research.

Before joining SDSC, Arshjot Khehra received his MSc in Artificial Intelligence from USI Lugano, where he completed his thesis on hierarchical graph reinforcement learning. Previously, he worked for 4+ years across India and Singapore gaining data science experience in insurance, logistics, and manufacturing sectors. He also holds a BSc in Industrial Engineering from PEC Chandigarh. Over the course of his career, Arshjot worked on a wide array of projects, such as, handwritten text recognition and generation, voice matching across phone call recordings, policy lapse rate prediction for customer retention, and automated insurance claim processing.

Silvia holds an MSc in Computer Science from EPFL and a PhD in Computer Science from the University of York, UK. She has been a senior research fellow at the University of Trento and later at Politecnico di Milano, Italy. Here, she had the chance to work on Marie Curie and ERC projects relating to natural language processing. From 2012 to 2019, she was a Senior Manager and NLP expert at ELCA Informatique Switzerland, whose AI department she helped create and expand. Silvia joined the Swiss Data Science Center in 2019 and is currently its Chief Transformation Officer, in charge of the team leading organizations to digital transformation.