Martin Vetterli received his
electrical engineering degree from
ETH Zurich in 1981, and then completed a
Master of Science degree in electrical engineering at
Stanford University in 1982. He later pursued his
PhD at
EPFL in 1986. After his dissertation, he was an assistant and associate professor in electrical engineering at
Columbia University in
New York, and in 1993, he became an associate and then full professor at the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at the
University of California at Berkeley in
California. In 1995, he joined
EPFL as a full-time professor. He held several positions there, including chair of communication systems and founding director of the National Competence Center in Research on Mobile Information and Communication systems (NCCR-MICS). From 2004 to 2011, he was vice president of
EPFL for international affairs and, from 2011 to 2012, he was the dean of the School of Computer and Communications Sciences at
EPFL. In 2015, he was elected to the
United States National Academy of Engineering as an International Member for his contributions to the development of time-frequency representations and algorithms in multimedia signal processing and communications. From 2013 to 2016 he was the president of the National Research Council of the
Swiss National Science Foundation, before being elected as the president of
EPFL in
Switzerland. He is also responsible for developing, publishing and maintaining an extensive
massive open online course on the basics of
digital signal processing. The course is a collaboration effort between him and his colleague, Paolo Prandoni. The course was first offered in February 2013 on
Coursera and has been offered every year on the site since then. Each session runs for 10 weeks.
Scientific contributions Martin Vetterli works in the areas of
electrical engineering,
computer science and
applied mathematics. His work covers
wavelets and applications, image and video compression (
data compression), self-organized communications systems and
sensor networks, as well as fast algorithms. File:Sampled.signal.svg|Signal processing File:Network_Tree_diagram.png|Communication networks File:Spherical_pressure_waves.gif|Audio processing File:TomographyPrinciple_Illustration.png|Inverse problems and tomography File:Gustav_Klimt_039.jpg|eFacsimile At the core of his laboratory's current research is mathematical signal processing, that is, the set of tools and algorithms from applied harmonic analysis that are central to signal processing. These include representations for signals (Fourier, wavelets, frames), sampling theory, and sparse representations. A main application of signal processing is in communications and sensor networks. In addition to important classic topics like channel estimation and equalization, multiuser systems like sensor networks are of great interest. This leads to distributed compression, sampling, and modeling of physical phenomena. The area of audio processing and digital acoustics deals with multi-channel acquisition, processing and rendering of audio signals. This includes questions of sound field sampling, synthesis and perception. Inverse problems and tomography are key signal processing tasks where state of the art techniques have high potential impact. In particular, the project on ultrasound tomography intends to solve a long-standing quest for a safe and affordable breast cancer screening method. In the area of image/video processing and applications, his research has on-going projects in image acquisition, image representations, and super-resolution imaging. Applications include image annotation and augmented reality for mobile devices. The eFacsimile research project, sponsored by
Google, is focused on the research and development of a new acquisition, representation and rendering paradigm for the high-quality reproduction of artwork. The research of Martin Vetterli has led to about 150 journal papers and resulted also in about two dozen patents that led to technology transfers to high-tech companies and the creation of several start-ups. Martin Vetterli is a co-author of the book
Wavelets and Subband Coding (Prentice-Hall, 1995). In 2008, Vetterli authored with Paolo Prandoni a free textbook
Signal Processing for Communications. In 2014, another book with the title
Foundations of Signal Processing (coauthored by
Jelena Kovačević and
Vivek Goyal) was also published freely accessible.
Presidency of the EPFL On 1 January 2017, Martin Vetterli became the
EPFL's fifth president. The priorities of his direction team include
open science,
computational thinking and
sustainability. Starting 1 January 2025, the
Swiss Federal Council appointed
Anna Fontcuberta i Morral as the sixth President of EPFL for a 4-year term, succeeding Martin Vetterli. She is the first woman to hold the position. == Awards and honours ==