UrbanTwin – Seeing double for sustainability
Twins are a fascinating phenomenon: observing how identical twins, even those separated at birth, can resemble each other in appearance,…
Containergy – a new performance evaluation and profiling tool
The Embedded Systems Lab of EPFL has developed a new performance evaluation and profiling tool that uses software containers to…
Silicon device dependability – talk by visiting professor Sani Nassif
EcoCloud Visiting Professor Sani Nassif gave a talk in the BC Building at EPFL to a captivated audience. The talk…
Twins are a fascinating phenomenon: observing how identical twins, even those separated at birth, can resemble each other in appearance, character, ability, and personal taste is astounding. It demonstrates the power of DNA, the smallest of building blocks, in creating surprisingly predictable results. Now, UrbanTwin, a collaboration of Swiss research institutions within the ETH Domain, led by EPFL through laboratories of four different schools (STI, ENAC, IC, and SB) and four centers, plans to make identical twins of another kind,…
The Embedded Systems Lab of EPFL has developed a new performance evaluation and profiling tool that uses software containers to perform application runtime assessment, providing energy and performance profiling data. It is focused on energy efficiency for next generation workloads and IT infrastructure. Read more here.
EcoCloud Visiting Professor Sani Nassif gave a talk in the BC Building at EPFL to a captivated audience. The talk examines trends in Silicon device dependability as scaling continues, and proposes some areas of cross-domain research that are needed to keep the information infrastructure functioning in the future.
Gabriele Manoli studies water supplies, energy exchange and the carbon cycle in urban and suburban systems. His interdisciplinary approach unites environmental technology, infrastructure and urban planning. He is currently investigating the worldwide trend towards urban densification and the effects of altering the urban climate (e.g. through greening measures). In collaboration with EcoCloud Prof. Manoli will be investigating urban structure and dynamics, in particular modelling the evolution urban systems in terms of their development through time and space. Read more
Having come through a heatwave it is easy to forget that humans are not the only ones that need to shelter from oppressive heat. Animals suffer too, and huge mechanical infrastructures like railways, even major runways. But what about computers? From the beginning, data centers have faced problems with cooling. In the old days, it was known that Google had a fantastic set-up in their data centers where super computers would be laid out in open rows, in a refrigerated environment. Technicians…
EcoCloud partner Microsoft Research have announced the laureates of their PhD Fellowships, including Simla Harma for her work on Cloud Infrastructure. Having won a Google Scolarship in 2021, Simla can lay claim to a unique achievement, in being funded by two of IT’s largest and most influential corporations. Simla is from Turkey, and is working in the project ColTrain, as a member of Prof. Falsafi’s PARSA lab.
We at the EPFL EcoCloud Center condemn the brutal crackdowns against people protesting the Iranian regime and the actions of its so-called morality police. In particular we condemn the violent repression of students and academic staff at universities in Iran. These actions are in violation of basic human rights and pose a serious threat to academic freedom. We stand in solidarity with the faculty, students, staff and victims, and call for an immediate end to these brutal acts of violence.
The ETH Board has announced a joint initiative in the strategic areas of Energy, Climate and Environmental Sustainability and Engagement and Dialogue with Society: UrbanTwin – A digital twin for urban infrastructure, assessing the effectiveness of climate-related policies and actions Urban areas are responsible for 75% of greenhouse gas emissions, while rising temperatures significantly impact their liveability. They represent a natural integrator of several systems, including energy, water, buildings, and transport. As a matter of fact, they represent the ideal…
Today EPFL inaugurated its new heating plant, which has the capacity to heat and cool the Lausanne campus solely by drawing water from Lake Geneva and recovering excess heat from a connected data center. The ceremony was attended by local political leaders including Vassilis Venizelos, who is a Vaud Canton councilor and the head of the Canton’s department of youth, the environment and security. The plant – some three years in the making – marks a major step towards the…
On the 9th of December, 2021 the world of IT security abruptly went into a state of shock. An alarming message was spreading like wildfire: RCE 0-day exploit found in log4j For the uninitiated, there is a lot to unpack here. “RCE” stands for remote code execution: similar to when somebody takes control of your computer with TeamViewer to run programs of their choosing. In this context, however, control is exerted without the consent, or even the knowledge of…
Featured talk at EPFL: UGraalVM’s full power in the Database Starting with Oracle Database 21c, developers can execute JavaScript within the database. This functionality is enabled by the Multilingual Engine (MLE), powered by GraalVM, and enables Oracle APEX 20.2 to be the first (and only) low code framework on the planet which natively supports server-side JavaScript, out of the box. In this talk, we will get a glimpse into the architecture of MLE which solves the challenge of embedding a…
Swiss business magazine Bilan spoke to David Atienza about how Swiss Vault, Infomaniak and EcoCloud are planning to revolutionise data center technology with lower power comsumption and greater efficiency. Il est possible de stocker et gérer ses données sans polluer
Just 12-months after it was created, in December 2004, 1-million people were active on Facebook. As of December 2021 it had an average 1.93 billion daily active users. EPFL is in a unique collaboration with its parent company Meta around distributed deep learning research. For a user base of this size, large-scale automated-systems must be utilized to understand user experience in order to ensure accuracy and success. EPFL’s Machine Learning and Optimization Laboratory (MLO), led by Professor Martin Jaggi, is…
EcoCloud strongly condemns Russia’s military invasion and acts of war in Ukraine, as well as the dreadful violation of international humanitarian and human rights law. We are really shocked by the tragedy currently unfolding in Ukraine, and we fully support everyone affected by the war. The EcoCloud community calls on the different governments to take immediate action to protect everyone in that country, particularly including its civilian population and people affiliated with its universities. Now more than ever, we must…
After going virtual since 2022, ASPLOS is returning to Lausanne for the 2022 edition, 28th February to 4th March. The 2022 edition of ASPLOS marks its 40th anniversary. In 1982, ASPLOS emerged as the ultimate conference for researchers from a variety of software and hardware system communities to collaborate and engage technically. It has been ahead of the curve in technologies such as RISC and VLIW processors, small and large-scale multiprocessors, clusters and networks-of-workstations, optimizing compilers, RAID, and network-storage system…
Under the initiative of the armasuisse – Cyber-Defence Campus, a team of EPFL scientists, including CYD Doctoral Fellow Dina Mahmoud of PARSA, recently presented the first proof-of-concept for undervolting-based fault injection from the programmable logic of a field programmable gate array (FPGA) to the software executing on a processing system in the same system-on-chip (SoC). The team also proposes a number of future research directions, which, if addressed, should help to ensure the security of today’s heterogeneous computing systems. Most…
An exciting new development in the progress of Midgard, a novel re-envisioning of the virtual memory abstraction ubiquitous to computer systems, sees a tech leader funding research that will bring together experts from Yale, the University of Edinburgh and EcoCloud at EPFL. Global semiconductor manufacturer Intel is sponsoring an EcoCloud-led project entitled “Virtual Memory for Post-Moore Servers”, which is part of its wider research into improving power performance and total cost of ownership for servers in big-scale datacenters. What is…
© cherezoff / Adobe Stock Today’s data centres have an efficiency problem – much of their energy is used not to process data, but to keep the servers cool. A new server architecture under development by the EU-funded COMPUSAPIEN project could solve this. As the digital revolution continues to accelerate, so too does our demand for more computing power. Unfortunately, current semiconductor technology is energy-inefficient, meaning so too are the servers and cloud technologies that depend on them. In fact,…
The Cloud Sustainability Days, organised by the EPFL EcoCloud Center, are beginning. LINK TO LIVE COVERAGE PROGRAM Please use the basement entrance: This conference is organised by the EPFL EcoCloud Center for sustainable cloud technologies, with the participation of the Swiss Datacenter Efficiency Association, the EPFL FUSTIC association, members of EPFL Faculty, and industrial partners. The program will cover sustainability in cloud infrastructure with focus on IT (servers, storage, network) and DC (electricity, cooling, heat recycling) infrastructure efficiency and emissions.…
Researchers at Ecocloud, the EPFL Center for Sustainable Cloud Computing, have pioneered an innovative approach to implementing virtual memory in data centers, which will greatly increase server efficiency. Virtual Memory has always been a pillar for memory isolation, protection and security in digital platforms. The use of virtual memory is non-negotiable, even in widely-used hardware accelerators like GPU, NICs, FPGAs and secure CPU architectures. It is therefore vital that silicon should be used as frugally as possible. As services host…
Simla Burcu Harma, a researcher on the ColTrain project, has received the Generation Google Scholarship for Women in Computer Science. @SimlaBurcu
DNN training and inference have similar basic operators but with fundamentally different requirements. The former is throughput bound and relies on high precision floating-point arithmetic for convergence while the latter is latency-bound and tolerant to low-precision arithmetic. Both workloads require high computational capabilities and can benefit from hardware accelerators. The disparity in resource requirements forces datacenter operators to choose between custom accelerators for training and inference or training accelerators for inference.
In their paper, the researchers introduce a nanowire-based device to create high-electron-mobility tri-gate transistors for power-conversion applications. Based on nanoscale structures, the novel transistor design significantly reduces heat loss during the energy conversion process.
Contrary to expectations, the experiment revealed that the respondents held on to their views firmly, regardless of the celebrity inputs or their esteem in the eyes of the respondents. It was also clear that respondents liked to hear an opinion identical to their own even if it came from a disliked celebrity. Conversely, a dissenting opinion by a celebrity or expert reduced the respondent’s empathy for that person.
Two EPFL students have developed PowerSGD, an algorithm that allows compression of the needed bandwidth without compromising the accuracy of the training.
CrowdNotifier, a new protocol developed in part at EPFL. It alerts people who attended an event where there was a risk of COVID-19 infection.
Researchers from EPFL and INRIA have developed the first online FL system called FLeet, which makes it possible to carry out machine learning on mobile devices in real-time without any impact on learning tasks.
The study, which has won the "Prize for the research and Personal Data Protection Emilio Aced" given by the Spanish data protection agency (AEPD), raises a potent question: Does the use of parental control apps justify the dangers arising from the collection and processing of private data?
An international group of scientists has collaborated to present a photonic hardware accelerator that is capable of operating at speeds of “trillions of multiply-accumulate operations per second,” far beyond the capabilities of existing computer processors.
As the applications of AI increase rapidly, the scientific community, as well as lawmakers, are concerned that unregulated AI can lead to misuse and abuse.
In this context, the European Commission took a clear stance by releasing a white paper in February 2020, which could lead to a regulatory framework for AI.
Distributed computing is already playing a pivotal role in a wide range of applications including web-based communications and intelligent information systems. In keeping with this development, EcoCloud presented a research project award to Rafael Pinot for his ongoing work on controlling the spread of fake news or infectious diseases based on the theory of gossip protocols.
Managing humanitarian aid is one of the most important problems in the modern world. It is also a very powerful and direct approach to make a lasting global impact. Keeping that in context, experts at ETH Zurich and EPFL--two of Switzerland's leading federal institutes of technology--have joined hands with the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) to launch the Engineering Humanitarian Aid initiative.
Digipredict detects the first signs of a ‘cytokine storm’ in high-risk COVID-19 patients, thus allowing doctors to act before it causes serious damage to the cardiovascular systems. Cytokines are proteins that play an important role in normal immune responses, but having a large amount of them released in the body all at once can be harmful.
The Board of the Swiss Federal Institutes of Technology has announced the appointment of Pascal Frossard as Full Professor of Electrical Engineering and Electronics in the School of Engineering (STI). Currently Associate Professor at EPFL, he joined the EcoCloud faculty in 2018 to help the research centre drives its cloud computing programs.
About a year ago, when the novel coronavirus broke out, medical science not only failed to arrest its spread but also to properly identify the developmental stages of the disease. Many casualties resulted because the progression of the disease was an enigma. In the later part of the year, there were nascent attempts to harness AI for COVID-19 diagnosis, treatment, and monitoring. A giant step in that direction has been taken recently by researchers at EPFL; they have developed algorithms that can practically see and hear COVID in a patient’s lungs.
At least three EPFL laboratories are working in tandem on the project: Computer Vision Laboratory led by Professor Pascal Fua, Realistic Graphics Lab led by Assistant Professor Wenzel Jakob, and Embedded Systems Lab spearheaded by Professor David Atienza (also a faculty member at EcoCloud).
EcoCloud is happy to announce that Anne-Marie Kermarrec, Professor in the School of Computer and Communication Sciences at EPFL, has now come aboard the EcoCloud faculty.
Each year, a student of the Microengineering Section of EPFL is awarded the prestigious OMEGA Student Award for contributing to scientific and technological advances in the disciplines of Microengineering, Micro- and Nanotechnologies, and Chronometry. This year, the Board of the Foundation of the OMEGA Prize decided to honor Mohammed Hédi Fendri, a master student at the Institute of Microengineering in EPFL’s School of Engineering.
The ICCAD Executive Committee has recognized “3D-ICE: Fast Compact Transient Thermal Modeling for 3D ICs with Inter-Tier Liquid Cooling” as “the most influential on research and industrial practice in computer-aided design of integrated circuits over the ten years since its original appearance at ICCAD.” The authors of the paper are Arvind Sridhar, Alessandro Vincenzi, Martino Ruggiero, David Atienza (all from the Embedded Systems Laboratory – ESL at EPFL), and Thomas Brunschwiler (IBM Zurich Research Laboratory).
In a major recognition of Swiss innovation and excellence in database research, the VLDB Endowment has conferred the prestigious VLDB Women in Database Research Award on Anastasia Ailamaki, EPFL professor and co-founder of Raw Labs.
Digital technology is running up against its physical limits. One solution is to build more data centers – but that needs to go hand in hand with a reduction in their carbon footprint.
Her inclusion in Fortune’s 40 Under 40 provides Troncoso a platform to showcase the work done by the SPRING lab in alleviating the negative impact of technology on society, such as privacy concerns, and presenting purely system-based solutions rather than data-driven platforms.
Researchers at EPFL’s Laboratory of Photonics and Quantum Measurements (K-Lab), Trinity College Dublin (TCD), and Dublin City University (DCU) have teamed up to develop a new technique for generating variable low-noise microwaves with a single optical microresonator. The paper was recently published in Science Advances.
Given the fast pace of research, very few scientific studies stand the test of time. Even rarer is a study that continues to influence research a decade after its first publication. That distinction goes to “3D-ICE: Fast Compact Transient Thermal Modeling for 3D ICs with Inter-Tier Liquid Cooling,” a paper presented at the IEEE/ACM International Conference on Computer-Aided Design (ICCAD) 2010 Conference. It has been selected as the winner of the prestigious ICCAD 2020 - Ten Year Retrospective Most Influential Paper Award , which is one the most prestigious given in the Electronic Design Automation (EDA) community about industrial
One of the key researches in the domain of quantitative information flow (QIF) is to effectively estimate information leaks in a system in order to prevent adversarial attacks. Most existing approaches are based on the white-box approach. However, this approach is often impractical due to the size or complexity of its internals, or the presence of unknown factors. This and other challenges forced a shift in focus to investigate methods for measuring a system’s leakage in a black-box manner.
While scientists have successfully reduced the size and costs of electronic components, a major challenge faced by such tiny devices is the absence of an optimum thermal and energy management technology. To bridge that gap, Elison Matioli and his colleagues at EPFL’s Power and Wide-band-gap Electronics Research Laboratory (POWERlab) have developed a novel microchannel network that not only cools electronic components but also makes them energy efficient.
Facebook and EPFL have initiated a collaborative program that aims to carry out seminal research with common meeting points for both organizations. Facebook seeks to leverage EPFL’s proven expertise in Computer Science and Engineering to enable the flow of technology from one of the most renowned research institutions to the leading American social media conglomerate. The collaboration will also help the latter strengthen its position in Switzerland and gain access to some of the best academic minds in Europe.
EPFL researchers at the Security and Privacy Engineering (SPRING) Lab, School of Computer and Communication Sciences (IC), have developed a ‘Datashare Network’ that allows investigative journalists to exchange information securely and anonymously. A detailed paper on the subject will be presented by the scientists at the 29th Usenix Security Symposium (USENIX Security '20), which will be held online from August 12 to 14. The event, which brings together specialists in the security and privacy of computer systems and networks, will undoubtedly draw worldwide attention to the EPFL research.
The paper “Enabling Optimal Power Generation of Flow Cell Arrays in 3D MPSoCs with On-Chip Switched Capacitor Converters” is a collaborative research by Halima Najibi, Alexandre Levisse, Marina Zapater, and David Atienza, who are associated with EPFL’s Embedded Systems Laboratory (ESL). Considering the reputation of the symposium, built over a period of three decades, it is no mean achievement to have a paper accepted and then selected as the Best Paper. Many congratulations to the EPFL authors for their singular academic triumph.
As a CYD Doctoral Fellow, Dina will conduct research on vulnerabilities and backdoors in heterogeneous hardware platforms, for protecting the confidentiality, integrity and availability of cyber and cyber-physical systems.
This is an important breakthrough because high-frequency bands are prone to logjams because of high demand. On the other hand, microwave photonics offers high bandwidth, low transmission loss, and immunity to electromagnetic interference.
The first coronavirus digital contact-tracing app using OS updates from Google and Apple is now in a large-scale pilot test. Dubbed as SwissCovid, the app is based on the decentralized protocol, where operations that have data privacy implications are not stored or conducted through a centralized server, but on the phone of individual users. Employees at EPFL, ETH Zurich, the Swiss Army, and select hospitals and cantonal administrations can now download the app for tracing contacts at risk of transmission of COVID-19.
Mathias Payer and Hui Peng have developed a USB software security tool called USBFuzz. The researchers plan to release USBFuzz on GitHub as an open source project following their presentation at Usenix.
As the name implies, the international Decentralized Privacy-Preserving Proximity Tracing project (DP3T) focuses on data privacy and negates any chance of data being misused by hackers.
The research paper “Who is listening? Spokesperson Effect on Communicating Social and Physical Distancing Measures During the COVID-19 Pandemic” is authored by Andreas Spitz and Ahmad Abu-Akel (Institute of Psychology, University of Lausanne) and Robert West (School of Computer and Communication Sciences, EPFL).
A group of five researchers at EPFL’s Embedded Systems Laboratory (ESL) have developed an artificial intelligence-based system that allows you to record your cough and have it analyzed almost instantly to indicate whether you have COVID-19. In a few weeks’ time, the team will release an app, aptly named Coughvid, which will be available for free and direct download to your devices.
JEDI has appointed a high-profile scientific committee to run the ‘Billion Molecules against COVID-19’ challenge, including Babak Falsafi and Bryan Ford from EPFL’s School of Computer and Communication Sciences.
Researchers from EPFL and ETH Zurich have developed a digital contact tracing technology by working closely with a large number of European colleagues. They are now very close to releasing a solution called DP-3T (Decentralized Privacy-Preserving Proximity Tracing).
In a major breakthrough last year, EPFL and the Lausanne University Hospital (CHUV) collaborated to develop a secure software called the MedCo system. The system took shape in the Laboratory for Data Security (LDS), headed by Professor Jean-Pierre Hubaux, and is based on software libraries developed by the Decentralized and Distributed Systems (DEDIS) Lab, headed by Professor Bryan Ford.
To steer clear of false or misinterpreted information during the pandemic, Robert West advises a three-pronged strategy: check the sources of data interpretations and of the data itself; check whether graphs representing coronavirus data are linear or logarithmic; and retain the correct perspective by staying updated about data on the virus.
The nanodevice has the capacity to generate terahertz waves that are 20 times more powerful than any existing device today. That is a revolutionary advancement in the field because terahertz waves, despite their immense potential, are extremely difficult to achieve.
Atri joined EPFL in 2016 and completed his MS in Computer Science in 2018. Since then, he has worked at EPFL in the areas of microarchitectural security and design, and datacenter architectures. Through his years at EPFL, Atri has worked under the supervision of Prof. Babak Falsafi, Prof. Paolo Ienne, and Prof. M. Payer, completing many projects along the way.
Lana Josipović, Shabnam Sheikhha, Andrea Guerrieri, Paolo Ienne (all from EPFL, Processor Architecture Lab), and Jordi Cortadella (from Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Barcelona, Spain) are winners of the Best Paper Award at the 28th ACM/SIGDA International Symposium on Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA ’20), which concluded on February 25 at Seaside, California.
The Facebook Fellowship Program, initiated in 2013 and awarded in 21 different categories, encourages and supports doctoral students who are engaged in innovative research on computer science, engineering, and allied domains. The winners for 2020 have been announced, and they include the first-ever awardees from EPFL. Panagiotis Sioulas and Merlin Nimier-David, both PhD students at the School of Computer and Communication Sciences, are winners in the categories of Structured Data Stores and Computer Graphics respectively.
Computer Science is taking rapid strides in realigning itself to advancing technologies. It is beginning to emerge from the cocoon of traditional research to address new challenges posed by avant-garde technologies. In an article published in EPFL Magazine in December 2019, School of Computer and Communication Sciences (IC) Dean James Larus recorded his candid observations on the current status of the discipline at EPFL and the way forward.
Most discourses on the risks of Artificial Intelligence tend to focus on tech applications that are in the future horizon. The preoccupation with perceived threats such as sentient robots and AI consciousness takes away attention from AI-related issues that are already in the present, affecting simple daily activities such as reading the news, watching YouTube, or using a smartphone app. As School of Computer and Communication Sciences (IC) researchers Lê Nguyên Hoang and El Mahdi El Mhamdi emphasize in their new book, there is an urgent need to restate ethical questions related to algorithms in computational terms.
Seaside in Monterey County, California, will host the 28th ACM/SIGDA International Symposium on Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA) between February 23 and 25 this year. Recognized as the premier conference for advances in FPGA technology, the symposium draws research papers, tutorial papers on emerging applications and methodologies, and panel discussion proposals. Among the papers being presented at FPGA 2020 are several original submissions and a tutorial paper by computer scientists at EPFL, which comprise a very good representation at the prestigious global event.
Since its establishment in 2016, the EPFL International Risk Governance Center (IRGC) has not only drawn attention to increasingly complex risks that affect society, but also developed mitigation strategies for perceived risks. Given its fundamental role in the risk governance framework at EPFL, the appointment of James Larus, Dean of the School of Computer and Communication Sciences, assumes great significance.
Academia and industry leaders have come together to form the Swiss Datacenter Efficiency Association (SDEA) and announce the first datacenter efficiency label that aims to decarbonize datacenters and significantly reduce energy consumption on data platforms and infrastructures. It has École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) as one of its founding members.
The much anticipated list of Highly Cited Researchers for 2019 is out. Published annually by the Web of Science Group, a Clarivate Analytics company, the list, generally known as the Thomson Reuters list of Highly Cited Researchers, includes scientists who produced multiple papers ranking in the top 1% by citations for their field and year of publication. Among them is Tobias Kippenberg, Full Professor at EPFL’s Institute of Physics and Electrical Engineering and head of the Laboratory of Photonics and Quantum Measurements (K-Lab).
EcoCloud welcomes Tobias J. Kippenberg, professor at EPFL’s Laboratory of Photonics and Quantum Measurements (K-Lab), among its faculty.
The findings of the research project--including prototypes, benchmarks, and code—will be available as open source releases. That would enable the research community to build on the findings and further improve them over time. Conversely, the end users or developers can access the documentation, reports, and prototypes produced during the research to protect their code.
The research team plans to extend the precision of their weight generator circuit to support DNN applications that require weight precision higher than 4 bits. They are also exploring different types of digital-to-analog converter types for their weight generator circuit. Although the proposed circuit is applicable to any type of neural network, the EPFL researchers aim to benchmark their design with a recurrent neural network (RNN) workload and achieve a significant improvement in performance and energy-efficiency.
An eleven-member jury formed by Swiss business magazine Bilanz has announced the 100 most important heads of Switzerland who are at the forefront of digitization this year. The list of achievers has been sorted into various categories such as investors, blockchainers, scalers, transformers, administrators, drone acrobats, mentors, and data miners. Among the blockchainers is Professor Bryan Ford, who heads the Decentralized and Distributed Systems Lab (DEDIS) at EPFL’s School of Computer and Communication Sciences.
The European Research Council (ERC) has awarded a Starting Grant for the open-source research proposal “Code Sanitization for Vulnerability Pruning and Exploitation Mitigation.” The Principal Investigator of the research is Professor Mathias Payer, IC tenure-track assistant professor and head of the HexHive lab on software systems security at EPFL.
After extensive research, Professor Rachid Guerraoui and colleagues at EPFL’s School of Computer and Communication Sciences (IC) have proposed a nearly zero-energy alternative to the bitcoin. The system, dubbed Byzantine Reliable Broadcast, represents a paradigm shift in the approach toward cryptocurrencies.
Today, we have a slew of media houses and streaming services that inundate consumers with audio, video, online, and print news. This has raised the specter of rampant news misinformation and disinformation. The threat is amplified by broadcasters who use the same source to disseminate news to consumers. Any bias in the original news source is perpetrated by all secondary services, thus delivering a limited view of news to consumers. However, researchers at EPFL’s Distributed Information Systems Laboratory (LSIR) in the School of Computer and Communication Sciences have developed an algorithm that can detect such biases and external influences
Anastasia Ailamaki, professor of Computer and Communication Sciences at EPFL and co-founder of RAW Labs SA, has been honored with the SIGMOD E.F. Codd Innovation Award. The award recognizes her “pioneering work on the architecture of database systems, its interaction with computer architecture, and scientific data management.” She joins a distinguished group of past awardees, all of whom are influential scientists in the field of database management.
The good old roll of the dice is the archetype of randomness. And then there are lottery drawings and competitions where the outcome depends on generating random numbers. However, verifiable randomness, or the lack of predictability, continues to be a deep-rooted problem in cryptography. The newly constituted League of Entropy, with EPFL as a founding member, has decided to tackle the problem head on.
EPFL’s home-grown programming language Scala has won this year’s Programming Languages Software Award. The honor is awarded by ACM SIGPLAN each year to an individual or an institution to recognize the development of a software system that has had a significant impact on programming language research, implementations, and tools. Scala was originally developed by Professor Martin Odersky in 2004 at the School of Computer and Communication Sciences (IC). Professor Odersky now heads the Scala Center, an open-source foundation for the software based at EPFL.
The 2019 Spring Simulation Conference (SpringSim’19) concluded on May 2 at Tucson, Arizona. During the four-day event, many original papers were presented on the theory and practice of modeling and simulation in the scientific and engineering fields. The conference was especially significant for EPFL and EcoCloud because a paper co-authored by PhD scholar Yasir Mahmood Qureshi was selected for the Runner-up Paper Award.
Media coverage on the distant future of AI and machine learning have painted a scary picture of machines going berserk, rampaging killer robots, and rogue self-driving cars. Those ugly manifestations of machine learning are unlikely to go beyond fiction. But the dangers of machine learning can—and already have—taken different routes. A couple of podcasts featuring El Mahdi El Mhamdi, PhD scholar at EPFL, shed important light on the dark side of AI—poisoned data sets, bad actors, AI-generated fake news, and the Byzantine problem—and his work on technical AI safety and robustness in biological systems.
Elison Matioli, assistant professor at EPFL’s Institute of Electrical Engineering and director of the POWERlab, has joined EcoCloud.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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
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,
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
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.
Houston hosted this year’s annual conference of the ACM Special Interest Group on Management of Data (SIGMOND). During the five-day event (June 10-15), several awards were presented to a select group of participants. One of the most coveted of these awards is the Best Demonstration Award, won this year by Professor Anastasia Ailamaki and her student Eleni Tzirita Zacharatou. Both are attached to EPFL’s Data-Intensive Applications and Systems Laboratory. Prof. Ailamaki is Lab Director and Ms Zacharatou is pursuing her doctoral program in computer and communication sciences.
The ACM Multimedia Systems Conference (MMSys 2018) was held between June 12 and 15 in Amsterdam. More than 30 papers were presented at the event under the “research track,” but there was only one winner for the Best Paper Award: a research conducted by Xavier Corbillon, Francesca De Simone, Gwendal Simon, and Pascal Frossard on "Dynamic Adaptive Streaming for Multi-Viewpoint Omnidirectional Videos."
Each year, the Design Automation Conference (DAC) announces five winners of the Under-40 Innovators Award. This year, one of the winners of the coveted honor is David Atienza, Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at EPFL’s Embedded Systems Laboratory.
The ISSS awards only two researches out of the scores of nominations received for consideration from across all Swiss institutes. That emphasizes the novelty of the study by Hamza Harkous.
The 39th IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy concluded at San Francisco on May 23. It is considered to be one of the most prestigious events in the academic calendar each year as far as computer security and privacy issues are concerned.
Last month, Google announced the winners of its PhD Fellowship award for 2018. They include 39 researchers from North America, Europe, and the Middle East. Among them is Lana Josipović, a doctoral student in the Processor Architecture Laboratory led by Professor Paolo Ienne. She has been awarded for her outstanding research in the Systems and Networking domain.
The annual mega event at EcoCloud is just around the corner. In little over a fortnight, the Lausanne Palace Hotel will be a buzz of activity as it hosts the two-day EcoCloud annual event, slated for June 18–19. The venue’s prime location, which offers panoramic views of the city, Lake Geneva, and the magnificent Alps, will be an apt setting for industry experts to share insights on budding data and cloud computing platforms.
EcoCloud, the EPFL research center that drives today’s cloud computing technologies, warmly welcomes four new professors to its fold. They are Pascal Frossard, Carmela Troncoso, Robert West, and Paolo Ienne.
Each year, the IEEE Technical Committee on Cyber-Physical Systems (TCCPS) recognizes outstanding scientific contributions under various categories, including the Early- and Mid-Career awards. The winners for 2018 have just been announced by the Committee. Among the awardees is David Atienza, associate professor of electrical engineering and director of the Embedded Systems Laboratory (ESL) at EPFL. He has won the Mid-Career Award for “sustained contributions to thermal processor design and medical wearables.’’
The IBM PhD Fellowship Award, instituted in 1950 to recognize outstanding PhD students who drive innovation, is one of the most sought-after distinctions worldwide. Each year, only a chosen few make it to the elite group. Among the awardees for 2018 is Lefteris Kokoris-Kogias from EPFL’s Laboratory of Decentralized and Distributed Systems. His achievement is all the more creditable because he figured among the awardees for 2017 as well.
In March 2016, EPFL and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) signed a seminal agreement to establish the Humanitarian Tech Hub. The four-year program has opened many avenues of collaboration between the scientific and humanitarian fields. To further cement that relationship, ICRC has just announced the appointment of EPFL’s Edouard Bugnion to the ICRC Assembly.
Web browsing has become almost second nature to us. Each day, we plunge into tens of websites and unwittingly accept their long-winded privacy policies without bothering to peruse their stipulations. This is undoubtedly because those documents are shrouded in legalese too dense and cumbersome to read and digest. Yet, it is a well-known fact that many websites collect, store, and even use the private data that we inadvertently leave behind during our browsing sessions. Disturbingly, such practices are usually protected by the legal jargon contained in their privacy policies. So how do we ascertain the nature of data collected
Geo-replication is gaining ground for distributed services because it brings the services closer to the end users, reduces the page-load time, and increases user engagement. It also enables data platforms, such as that of Facebook, to survive data center failures. However, recent work has proven that no distributed data system can assure the best of desirable properties like low-latency access, partition tolerance, and strong consistency.
Training of large-scale machine-learning models is extremely challenging because the training data is much more than the memory capacity. However, scientists at IBM and EPFL have collaborated to develop a novel scheme that enables the use of accelerators such as GPUs and FPGAs to speed up the training of machine learning models. They presented their findings at the 31st Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS) in Long Beach, California.
Machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) are finding new applications across industries. Many tasks that were performed by humans are now being handled by machines, adding efficiency to the output. But what would happen if AI crosses the threshold of human control and makes unilateral decisions? It is a frightening, but highly probable, scenario. In 2014, it prompted Google to consider the idea of a “big red button” to stop dangerous AI in an emergency. However, the challenge is not in being able to stop or interrupt an AI process but in preventing AI from biased learning due to
The program in French can be found here.
Anastasia Ailamaki, Professor and Lab Director at the Data-Intensive Applications and Systems Laboratory (School of Computer and Communication Sciences), has just added another feather to the cap of EPFL’s research excellence. IEEE has included her as IEEE Fellow in the Class of 2018.
The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) has named EPFL Professor Edouard Bugnion as ACM Fellow for 2017. This is ACM’s most prestigious member grade where only the crème de la crème of the computing research fraternity find admittance.
The research will ultimately contribute to the next generation of financial services and likely even more innovative applications of the technology not only here in Switzerland but globally.
The digital revolution is now all-pervasive, charting breakthroughs in computing and information technology. Driving that change is a group of leading innovators across the world. Among them is David Atienza, associate professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and director of the Embedded Systems Laboratory at the School of Engineering, EPFL. In recognition of his outstanding scientific contributions to computing, the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) has acknowledged him as a "pioneering innovator" and a "2017 Distinguished Member."
The widespread availability of video streaming services and the proliferation of smartphones have enabled users to do away with the need to download heavy content and thus save storage space on their devices. But the service provider—be it YouTube, Netflix, or any other—has to face serious challenges in offering a seamless experience to users. Two of the major concerns are storage space on their servers, and the resultant power consumption. Conversely, the user is confronted with challenges like bandwidth issues, unstable streaming flow, and video encoding issues. However, a solution is in the making to enhance the user experience
Providers of payment systems and password-protected applications use advanced computation to ensure security of their services. It is generally accepted that if large numbers are used in developing a code, it becomes extremely difficult to solve the math and break the code. In this process, computation of discrete logarithms plays a crucial part. Until recently, the record for computing a discrete logarithm was in the multiplicative group of a 596-bit prime field. However that has now been surpassed in a collaborative research between EPFL and the University of Leipzig. The team has cracked an extremely lengthy code by using
In April this year, researchers at EPFL’s School of Computer and Communication Sciences (IC) gained recognition for exemplary work in computer science. While Vasileios Trigonakis was awarded the 2017 Eurosys Roger Needham Doctoral Dissertation Award, Immanuel Trummer bagged Honorable Mention for the 2017 SIGMOD Jim Gray Doctoral Dissertation Award.
All our conscious decisions are focused on the extent of control exercised by the stakeholders. This applies to developing a new project, nurturing a new company, or even building communities. Traditionally, the overarching drive in such activities has been the retention of centralized authority. But times are changing, and so is the Internet, with yeomen researches on the benefits of a decentralized system. At the forefront of such researches is the work of PhD scholar and EPFL researcher Lefteris Kokoris-Kogias. His outstanding work has earned him the IBM PhD Fellowship for 2017.
In this age of online marketing, e-commerce companies have turned into mega advertisers on the Internet. They use web browsers and mobile apps as their hidden eye to target personalized offers based on browsing and buying habits of the user.
Martin Jaggi Co-chairs Applied Machine Learning Days.
Swiss Radio and TV Station RTS 1 Hosts Martin Jaggi.
2017 EcoCloud Annual Event around the Corner.
David Atienza Chairs a Successful DATE 2017 Conference.
Martin Jaggi Wins 2016 Google Faculty Research Award.
Ten Swiss Joint Research Center Projects Launch at Workshop.
Effects as Implicit Capabilities Project Receives Funding.
Funding Awarded to Big Data Programming Language Abstractions Research.
Swiss Radio and TV Station RTS 1 Hosts Rachid Guerraoui.
EPFL’s Operating Systems Laboratory (LABOS) Receives Grant for Big Data Project.
Applied Machine Learning Project Receives Funding From Swiss National Science Foundation.
Jason Parker Wins 2016 IEEE Signal Processing Society Best Paper Award.
EPFL Lab Develops ByzCoin to Accelerate Bitcoin Transactions.
Baris Kasikci Receives Award for PhD Thesis.
David Kozhaya Wins Best Presentation Award.
Georgios Chatzopoulos Wins Best Paper Award.
EcoCloud Professor Volkan Cevher Awarded ERC Consolidator Grant.
EcoCloud Professor David Atienza Awarded ERC Consolidator Grant.
EPFL Cyber Security Startup Raises more than $2 Million in Funding.
EcoCloud Projects Receive Microsoft's Funding.
Babak Falsafi Guest-Stars at CompuCast.
John Thome Receives the Prestigious Nusselt-Reynolds Prize.
John Thome will moderate the ITHERM 2016 Panel on Micro-Two-Phase Liquid Cooling Systems for Electronics.
Pinar Tozun receives the ACM SIGMOD Jim Gray Doctoral Dissertation honorable mention award.
Baris Kasikci receives the Eurosys Roger Needham PhD Dissertation Award.
Jim Larus receives the EuroSys Test of Time Award.
Katerina Argyraki wins 2nd Eurosys Jochen Liedtke Young Researcher Award.
HW/SW Co-Design for Scalable Transactional Processing.
Exploring Manycore Architectures for Next-Generation HPC systems.
Consortium to Define European’s Roadmap for HPC.
Research Testbeds from Intel and Micron.
Failure Sketching in Industrial Toolchains.
Encyclopedia of Two-Phase Heat Transfer & Flow.
EcoCloud Sponsored Workshop on Reconfigurable Computing.
Welcome to EcoCloud Newsletter January 2016.
Anastasia Ailamaki and Babak Falsafi Named ACM Fellows.
George Prekas and Immanuel Trummer Win the Google Fellowship Award.
Tudor David wins the VMware Fellowship Award for 2015-2016.
Manos Karpathiotakis wins the IBM Fellowship Award for 2015-2016.
Article from EcoCloud in SmartMedia Insert in L'Hebdo.
Workloads from EcoCloud's CloudSuite benchmark included in Google Perfkit Benchmarker.
Katerina Argyraki is awarded SNFS/ERC Starting Grant.
Martin Odersky received the 2014 Swiss IT Special Award.
Alexandra Olteanu, Anne-Marie Kermarrec and Karl Aberer Receives WISE 2014 best paper Award.
Welcome to EcoCloud Newsletter October 2014.
IEEE Micro Big Data Guest Editors' Introduction By Babak Falsafi and Boris Grot
Edouard Bugnion was named Adjunct Professor by "Le Conseil des EPF".
Professor George Candea wins the 1st Eurosys Jochen Liedtke Young Researcher Award.
Onur Kocberber wins the distinguished Google Ph.D Fellowship Award for 2014 for outstanding research in computer science.
Cansu Kaynak wins the prestigious Anita Borg Scholarship Award. Cansu was also the recipient of the IBM Ph.D Fellowship.
Ioannis Alagiannis from the DIAS lab is the only European winner of the prestigious Symantec Fellowship award this year.