New IC Professors: Wenzel Jakob and Michael Kapralov
© 2016 EPFL
Two new Tenure Track Assistant Professors: Wenzel Jakob and Michael Kapralov have started at the School of Computer and Communication Sciences at the beginning of 2016. Both professors’ research has already gained recognition among the academic community.
Wenzel Jakob completed his Ph.D. at the Department of Computer Science at Cornell University. Prior to coming to the IC School, he worked as a Marie Curie postdoctoral fellow at ETH Zürich.
Wenzel’s research, in the Laboratory of Realistic Graphics, is in the area of computer graphics and involves creating synthetic images that reproduce the visual complexity of the tangible world. He develops efficient data structures and computational models that describe how light interacts with materials and validates them against measurements of physical samples to improve the accuracy and predictive capabilities of light transport simulations.
Michael Kapralov completed his Ph.D. at Stanford University. After Stanford, he spent two years as a post-doctoral researcher at the Theory of Computation Group at MIT, and subsequently a year at the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center.
Michael’s interests lie in theoretical computer science, with an emphasis on the design of efficient algorithms. In IC School, in the Laboratory of the Theory of Computation 4, his work will focus on the theoretical foundations of big data analysis. Michael’s research aims to expand the toolbox of sublinear algorithms, i.e. algorithms whose resource requirements are substantially smaller than the size of the input that they operate on, and to understand the limits of computing with constrained resources.
“Both data science and image synthesis are exciting research fields, with application to a wide variety of problems in industry and academia. We are truly delighted and fortunate to welcome Professors Kapralov and Jakob to IC School, both experts in their respective fields,” said Dean James Larus.