Profile picture
Administrative data

Sylvain Calinon

sylvain.calinon@epfl.ch https://calinon.ch

Nationality: Swiss

EPFL STI IEM LIDIAP
ELD 241 (Bâtiment ELD)
Station 11
1015 Lausanne

EPFL › STI › IEM › LIDIAP

Website: https://idiap.epfl.ch/

EPFL › STI › STI-SMT › SMT-ENS

Expertise

robot learning, human-robot collaboration, optimal control, model-based optimization
I am a Senior Research Scientist at the Idiap Research Institute and a Lecturer at EPFL, with research interests covering robot learning, optimal control, geometrical approaches, and human-robot collaboration. 

My work focuses on human-centered robotics applications in which the robots can acquire new skills from only few demonstrations and interactions. It requires the development of models that can exploit the structure and geometry of the acquired data in an efficient way, the development of optimal control techniques that can exploit the learned task variations and coordination patterns, and the development of intuitive interfaces to acquire meaningful demonstrations.

The developed approaches can be applied to a wide range of manipulation skills, with robots that are either close to us (assistive and industrial robots), parts of us (prosthetics and exoskeletons), or far away from us (teleoperation). My research is supported by the European Commission, by the Swiss National Science Foundation, by the State Secretariat for Education, Research and Innovation, and by the Swiss Innovation Agency.

Teaching & PhD

PhD Students

Cem Bilaloglu, Yiming Li, Ante Maric, Martin Schonger, Teng Xue, Yan Zhang

Past EPFL PhD Students as codirector

Hakan Girgin (2023), Noémie Laure Gwendoline Jaquier (2020), Thibaut Antoine Kulak (2021), Teguh Santoso Lembono (2022), Emmanuel Pignat (2021), Amirreza Razmjoo Fard (2026), Suhan Narayana Shetty (2024), Ajay Tanwani (2018)

Courses

Machine Learning for Engineers

EE-613

The objective of this course is to give an overview of machine learning techniques used for real-world applications, and to teach how to implement and use them in practice. Laboratories will be done in python using jupyter notebooks.