Articles by: John

Picture of RPC Valet Paper with the authors.

RPCValet features on The Morning Paper

Every weekday, avid followers of computer science wake up to a new writeup by the inimitable Adrian Colyer on his blog The Morning Paper. His insightful selections help bring practical ideas from the academia to the computing practitioner. In a year, readers are exposed to concepts and ideas from more than 200 papers. In his latest post, Adrian Colyer presents a paper co-authored by Alexandros Daglis, Mark Sutherland, and EcoCloud Founder-Director Babak Falsafi.

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Picture of Mario Drumond and Kaicheng Yu

EPFL Students Win European QIF Program 2019

Qualcomm Technologies has just announced four winners of the Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship (QIF) for 2019. Among them are Mario Paulo Drumond and Kaicheng Yu, students at EPFL’s School of Computer and Communication Sciences (EDIC). They have been recognized by Qualcomm for their outstanding research proposals on emerging technologies.

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Picture of Volkan Cevher

Volkan Cevher Wins Google Faculty Research Award

Google AI has announced the list of winners for its Faculty Research Awards (2018), and among them is Professor Volkan Cevher from the LIONS’ lab at EPFL. He has earned the distinction under the category ‘Machine learning and data mining.” He is one of only two winners from Europe in that category.

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EPFL professors Anastasia Ailamaki and Babak Falsafi

Shore-MT: Created by EPFL, Used by the World

In 2009, EPFL professors Anastasia Ailamaki and Babak Falsafi collaborated with their doctoral and postdoctoral students to present Shore-MT, a scalable storage manager for the multicore era. A decade later, Shore-MT continues to be a robust open-source database storage manager preferred by many users worldwide. In recognition of its continued relevance and usage, the original research paper has been honored with the 2019 EDBT Test-of-Time Award.

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Picture of Karl Aberer and the open science fund graphic

Open Science Fund: Breaking Barriers for Open Research

The impact of scientific research findings remains limited unless they are disseminated among the research community as a whole. However, sharing research openly is not easy because of many cultural and technological barriers. In a bid to remove those impediments in the way of open research, EPFL President Martin Vetterli launched the Open Science Fund in September 2018.

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Image showing the evaluation of SMoTherSpectre: transient execution attacks through port contention

New Research Leverages SMoTher, a Port-induced Side Channel

In a paper published earlier this month, a team of researchers from EPFL and IBM Research introduce the port-induced side channel called SMoTher. They show how it can be leveraged (instead of a cache-based side channel), as a powerful transient execution attack to leak secrets that may be held in registers or the closely-coupled L1 cache, called SMoTherSpectre.

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Carmela Troncoso, tenure-track assistant professor in the EPFL School of Computer and Communication Sciences (IC)

Carmela Troncoso Wins Google Honor

The winners for 2018 have just been announced, and among them is Carmela Troncoso, tenure-track assistant professor in the EPFL School of Computer and Communication Sciences (IC).

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Picture of Siddharth Gupta

EPFL Student Wins Best Paper Award at HPCA 2019

Siddharth Gupta is pursuing his doctoral program at the School of Computer and Communication Sciences (IC) under the supervision of Professor Babak Falsafi, founding director of the EcoCloud research center. Siddharth’s special area of interest is on systems and interdisciplinary systems problems in modern, large-scale datacenters. His current research focuses on providing architectural support for high-performance durable transactions with persistent memory. The award-winning paper stems from that focal area of his research engagement.

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New Research Meets FPGA Attacks Head On

Data centers are taking on huge workloads including Deep Neural Networks, data analytics, and video streaming. Even the most robust CPU- and GPU-based architectures are unable to handle today’s demanding computing environment. Therefore, the current trend is to turn to new forms of accelerators called Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs), which demonstrate superior energy performance. Commercial behemoths like Intel, Amazon, and Microsoft have added FPGAs in their data centers through takeovers and system implementations. However, are FPGAs safe from security attacks? If not, how can such attacks be tackled? A fresh research proposal by EPFL’s Mirjana Stojilovic seeks to address these and related concerns regarding FPGAs.

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