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.

In about two months’ time, participants will assemble in Seattle for the 26th ACM SIGSPATIAL International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems (ACM SIGSPATIAL 2018). Apart from the academic discourses that will take place at the four-day conference (November 6-9), the event is also of particular interest for EPFL because two of its outstanding researchers will be awarded the Best Paper Award for their contribution to the previous edition of the annual event.

The Dimitris N. Chorafas Foundation recognizes outstanding scientific work in selected fields in engineering sciences, medicine, and natural sciences. The winners are chosen each year from among the select list of graduating doctorate students submitted by the Foundation’s partner universities in Europe, North America, and Asia. One of this year’s awardees is Manos Karpathiotakis, who completed his PhD at EPFL’s Data-Intensive Applications and Systems (DIAS) Laboratory in 2017 and is currently a scientist at the laboratory.

In a press release last month, the Takis & Louki Nemitsas Foundation announced the selection of Anastasia Ailamaki, Professor and Director at EPFL’s Data-Intensive Applications and Systems Laboratory, as the Laureate of the NEMITSAS Prize 2018 in Computer Science.

The 48th International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN-2018) was held in Luxembourg City. The four-day event (June 25-28) saw thematic workshops and a series of more than 60 presentations by scholars in the realms of dependability and security research, fields that have been the raison d’être of DSN conferences over the years.