The collaborative engagement between Microsoft and EPFL goes back to 2008 when they came together, along with ETH Zurich, for the Microsoft Innovation Cluster for Embedded Software (ICES). That relationship has matured through the years with various phases of the Swiss Joint Research Center (JRC) projects. In the first two phases (2014-18), Swiss JRC supported 9 EPFL projects. After reviewing and ranking 29 proposals for phase III, including 13 from EPFL, JRC has now confirmed nine proposals. Three of them are from EPFL, including two projects submitted by EcoCloud faculty.

For four days (January 26-29), some of the best minds on Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence congregated for the Applied Machine Learning Days (AMLD) conference at the SwissTech Convention Center at EPFL, Lausanne. With EPFL being the principal organizer of the event, professors Marcel Salathé, Martin Jaggi, and Bob West played a stellar role in the conduct of the event. AMLD2019 included talks, tutorials, and workshops, but it will be best remembered for introducing 16 different “AI & your domain” tracks, which featured talks by domain experts and interesting panels.

The 32nd Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2018) was held in Montreal between December 2 and 8. The proceedings brought together 8000 attendees and 1011 papers. It also included posters and workshops covering an array of algorithms, theories, experiments, and ideas presented by the crème de la crème of researchers on machine learning. Sieving through this massive database, the insightful platform Medium has shortlisted its influential list of papers and poster presentations. In the latter list is “Training DNNs with Hybrid Block Floating Point,” which was presented by EPFL researchers Mario Drumond, Tao Lin, Martin Jaggi, and Babak Falsafi.

Teaching is an art, and not all teachers are blessed with that skill. It is one thing to deliver lectures to a classroom, and quite another to connect with the students in that classroom. Katerina Argyraki, Tenure Track Assistant Professor at EPFL’s School of Computer and Communication Sciences, clearly belongs to the rarer category of teachers who believe in understanding students’ aptitudes and tailoring lessons accordingly. It is, therefore, not at all surprising that she was recently chosen as “best teacher.”

In early September, scientists, researchers, and industry leaders assembled in Rome for the 26th European Signal Processing Conference (EUSIPCO 2018). This year, the conference received 869 submissions, out of which about 550 were accepted. The reviewers sieved through those hundreds of important research papers to finally announce the Eurasip Best Student Paper Award. The authors of the winning paper are Mira Rizkallah (INRIA, visiting scholar at EPFL), Francesca De Simone (Post-doctoral fellow at EPFL), Thomas Maugey (INRIA), Christine Guillemot (INRIA), and Pascal Frossard (Associate Professor, EPFL).

Browsing websites is not without perils. With each visit, you leave some personal data that might be stored and even used by the website to their advantage. Data protection policies posted on websites are meant to make visitors wary of the danger, but the policies are either wrapped in incomprehensible legalese or clothed with seemingly innocuous generic terms that increase ambiguity about what a website does with your personal data. In February this year, researchers at EPFL launched an AI-backed program called Polisis to make life simpler by automatically scanning thousands of websites and generating an accurate and intelligible summary of the data protection policies in a matter of seconds. Few months down the line, the unique program has attracted more than a score of licensing requests from all over the world.

In early July this year, the Board of the Swiss Federal Institutes of Technology appointed Mathias Payer as Tenure Track Assistant Professor in EPFL’s School of Computer and Communication Sciences. In a later development, Prof. Payer agreed to become a member of EcoCloud and share his expertise in protecting computer systems from malicious attacks.

The prestigious MICRO Test of Time (ToT) Award is an annual feature at the IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture. This year was the 51st edition of the conference, held between October 20 and 24 in Fukuoka City, Japan. In the course of the conference, the Awards Committee named Thomas Ball and James R. Larus as the winners of the fifth MICRO Test of Time Award. That is an honor for EPFL as well; Professor Larus is Dean of the School of Computer and Communication Sciences (IC).

Machine learning has become ubiquitous today with applications ranging from accurate diagnosis of skin cancers and cardiac arrhythmia to recommendations on streaming channels and gaming. However, in the distributed machine learning scheme, what if one ‘worker’ or ‘peer’ is compromised? How can the aggregation system be resilient to the presence of such an adversary?

Martin Jaggi, Tenure Track Assistant Professor at EPFL’s School of Computer and Communication Sciences, has won the Google Focused Research Award for 2018 in the area of Machine Learning. The award-winning investigation was on “Large-Scale Optimization: Beyond Convexity,” completed jointly with Alexandre d’Aspremont and Francis Bach.