EPFL’s Center for Digital Trust holds its first General Assembly

Posted at November 6, 2018
Tags  ,
Category Technology
Posted by Roncal
0 Comments

06.11.18 – The founding General Assembly of EPFL’s Center for Digital Trust (C4DT) was held on Friday, 2 November at the Starling Hotel. Martin Vetterli, President of the Ecole polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Edouard Bugnion, Vice President for Information Systems, Andreas Mortensen, Vice President for Research, and James Larus, Dean of the School of Computer and Communication Sciences were among the attendees. 
The event was attended by over 50 guests, including CEOs and senior directors of the Center’s partner institutions and businesses, as well as EPFL professors representing all ten thematic domains of the center. EPFL President Martin Vetterli…

Read more

EPFL uses blockchain technology to secure e-voting systems

Posted at June 29, 2018
Tags  ,
Category Technology
Posted by Roncal
0 Comments

29.06.18 – An e-voting system based on blockchain technology has just been tested at EPFL. The system serves as a digital guarantee, ensuring that competing sides have faith in the voting process. This open-source technology will soon be available on the Center for Digital Trust’s software platform.
E-voting is becoming increasingly popular both in Switzerland and further afield. The town of Zug, for instance, is currently testing an online questionnaire – a first step towards e-voting. But doubts about whether centralized systems are secure prevent online voting from being adopted more widely. EPFL, through the Center for Digital Trust (C4DT), has created and tested an e-voting system based on blockchain technology. It is the first such system to guarantee …

Read more

Tracking cancer-cell development with “drinkable” electronic sensors

Posted at June 22, 2018
Tags  ,
Category Technology
Posted by Roncal
0 Comments

22.06.18 – Thanks to an unorthodox approach being proposed by EPFL researchers, patients may soon be able to track their illness simply by drinking a solution containing millions of tiny electronic sensors disguised as bacteria.
Imagine being able to track the development of diseased cells in real time, simply by having patients drink a glass of water containing millions of tiny electronic biosensors. Once the microscopic sensors have been ingested, they would travel to diseased tissue in a patient’s body and send out a continuous stream of diagnostic data via telemetry. That’s the ambitious goal that Sandro Carrara from EPFL’s Integrated Systems Laboratory (School of Engineering/ Computer and Communication Sciences) and Pantelis Georgiou from Imperial College London have set for themselves. Such technology seems now possible thanks to advancements in nanofabrication processes for integrated circuits. Berkeley researchers had discussed a similar concept in 2013 where they suggested to sprinkle CMOS circuits into the human cortex to monitor neural activity. At EPFL, the researchers intend to use body dust for a more general purpose. They have already shown how a CMOS cube of around 10 µm on each side could theoretically be created. They presented these findings at the IEEE BioCAS conference. The theoretical feasibility of the concept has also been discussed in a preprint on arXiv. The scientists hope to revolutionize diagnostic methods and give doctors a better understanding of diseases like cancer. “Today doctors give drugs to cancer patients and wait to see whether the tumor cells go away. But having continuous feedback on…

Read more

Artificial intelligence can help you protect your personal data

Posted at February 15, 2018
Tags  ,
Category Technology
Posted by Roncal
0 Comments

15.02.18 – It’s a safe bet that some of the websites and apps you use collect and subsequently sell your personal data. But how can you know which ones? An EPFL researcher has led the development of a program that can answer that question in just a few seconds, thanks to artificial intelligence.
If you’re like most people, you don’t always take the time to read website terms and conditions before accepting them. Not only are they extremely lengthy, they are also convoluted and written in opaque legalese. However, they can contain surprising clauses about a website’s or app’s right…

Read more

Modeling human behavior with Airbnb

Posted at February 9, 2018
Tags  ,
Category Technology
Posted by Roncal
0 Comments

09.02.18 – Researchers at Idiap and EPFL have been working with psychologists to understand how people form first impressions from photos. They focused on how people respond to properties available on Airbnb. Better analysis of human behavior should allow scientists to program machines capable of making more “human” decisions. 
With just a few clicks on TripAdvisor or Airbnb, you can book a romantic apartment for a weekend away with your partner, or a stylish restaurant for a business lunch. The rapid decisions involved, based mainly on images, are far from trivial given their commercial importance and the economic revolution represented…

Read more

How can humans keep the upper hand on artificial intelligence?

Posted at December 1, 2017
Tags  ,
Category Technology
Posted by Roncal
0 Comments

01.12.17 – EPFL researchers have shown how human operators can maintain control over a system comprising several agents that are guided by artificial intelligence.
In artificial intelligence (AI), machines carry out specific actions, observe the outcome, adapt their behavior accordingly, observe the new outcome, adapt their behavior once again, and so on, learning from this iterative process. But could this process spin out of control? Possibly. “AI will always seek to avoid human intervention and create a situation where it can’t be stopped,” says Rachid Guerraoui, a professor at EPFL’s Distributed Programming Laboratory and co-author of the EPFL study. That…

Read more

Recent Posts

RSS EPFL News