INTERVIEWS

PODCAST/VIDEO INTERVIEWS by Stephen Ibaraki

Chat with Professor Marcel Salathé

This week, Stephen Ibaraki has an exclusive interview with Prof. Marcel Salathé.

Prof. Marcel Salathé
EPFL

Marcel Salathé is a digital epidemiologist working at the interface of health and computer science. He obtained his PhD at ETH Zurich and spent two years as a postdoc in Stanford before joining the faculty at Penn State University in 2010 at the Center for Infectious Disease Dynamics. In 2014, he spent half a year at Stanford as visiting assistant professor. In the summer of 2015, he became an Associate Professor at EPFL where he heads the Digital Epidemiology Lab at the Campus Biotech in Geneva. In 2016, he founded the EPFL Extension School, whose mission is to provide high quality online education in digital technology, and where he is the Academic Director.

Marcel Salathé works at the forefront of artificial intelligence and its application on health and other domains. His lab created crowdAI.org, an open AI challenge platform whose goal is to accelerate research on big data across multiple scientific domains, and which is used by organizations such as the UN, Microsoft, Google, SBB, Stanford University, and many others. He is the initiator and co-organiser of the “Applied Machine Learning Days”, now one of Europe's largest conferences on the application of machine learning across all domains. He also co-founded PlantVillage, a knowledge exchange and AI platform on crop diseases, and the FoodRepo project, a suite of AI-based platforms, tools and datasets to advance personalized nutrition.

He published numerous scientific papers in the biological, medical, and computational fields, and wrote a book called, "Nature, in Code". He led the development of two popular MOOCs, "Epidemics - The Dynamics of Infectious Disease", and "Nature, in Code: Biology in JavaScript."

Marcel Salathé is the Vice Chair of the ITU Focus Group "AI for health", where he coordinates the development of a benchmarking process for AI health algorithms to accelerate the global regulatory approval process for AI-based health applications.

Marcel spent a few years in the tech industry as web application developer. He was part of the renowned Y Combinator startup accelerator’s class of Winter 2014. In 2018, he was elected as one of the 100 Digital Shapers in Switzerland by Bilanz and Digital Switzerland.

TO WATCH THE VIDEO INTERVIEW, CLICK ON THIS MP4 file link