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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.