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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 in the news industry.

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.