After obtaining a diploma of electrical engineer in 1994 at EPFL (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Lausanne, Switzerland), Alain Dufaux has joined the Institute of Microtechnology (IMT) of the University of Neuchâtel, in the team of Professor Pellandini (Electronics and Signal Processing Laboratory). His research activities were first dedicated to speech compression and recognition, and then, he specialized in audio processing. His PhD thesis, presented in 2001, concerned detection and recognition of impulsive sound signals.
Still in 2001, Alain Dufaux participated to the Launch of the company Dspfactory SA in Marin, emerged from Dspfactory Ltd. in Canada. Active in the field of ultra-low-power DSP processors for applications like hearing aids, consumer audio or medical devices, this company was acquired in 2004 by the worldwide company AMI Semiconductor. During 6 years, Alain occupied several positions:
– Head of signal processing group in the Advanced Application department;
– Senior member of the Applied DSP and embedded software group in Canada, developing low-power audio algorithms;
– Signal processing specialist in the european customer support team, especially active in trainings and tutorials dedicated to low-delay multirate filterbanks and low-power signal processing techniques for hearing aids.
Alain was back at EPFL in November 2006, at first as head of the Vision & Embedded DSP Group in the Laboratory of Microengineering for Manufacturing (LPM). In this role, most of the effort was dedicated to team management, definition of research projects or partnerships with industries, project follow-up, and support or co-direction of the PhD thesis of the lab. In October 2008, Alain also became responsible for the management of the Micro-assembly group of the LPM, and was enrolled as co-lecturer for the course “Méthodes de Production”.
In Spring 2011, Alain Dufaux has joined the MetaMedia Center (MMC) recently launched by the Vice-Presidency for Innovation and Valorization (VPIV). Acting as project manager, his activity is split between the operational tasks of the Montreux Jazz Digital Project, and the numerous innovation projects initiated by the MMC in partnership with the labs of EPFL working around acoustics, signal processing or multimedia.
Since June 2014, Alain is the operation & development director of the Metamedia Center, renamed Cultural Heritage & Innovation Center in 2020.
