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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.