Professor Marc Langheinrich reflected on how, two decades ago, the decision to establish a Faculty of Informatics was far from obvious. However, it was a choice that paid off: "With almost 30 assistant, associate and full professors, we have become one of the most numerous and successful Faculty of Informatics in Switzerland, after those of the Swiss Federal Institutes of Technology. In several strategic areas, such as software engineering, we are among the top 25 faculties worldwide and the top 3 in Europe, while considering all’our research fields, we are probably among the top 20 in Europe," explains the Dean. However, research is not the only focus of the Faculty, which also pays special attention to teaching and education.
The Faculty of Informatics has always utilised English as its primary language to attract students and lecturers from around the globe. Many prominent figures in the field have passed through its halls, including Shane Legg, the founder of DeepMind; Michael Bronstein and Robert Soulé, who are now professors at Oxford and Yale universities, respectively; Jürgen Schmidhuber, one of the pioneers of deep learning; and Michele Parrinello, who was considered a potential candidate for the Nobel Prize in Chemistry this year.
The Dean explains that the Faculty is structured in specialised institutes: "Even before the Faculty existed, USI already had a unit specialising in Artificial Intelligence, the Dalle Molle Institute for Artificial Intelligence ( IDSIA ), run jointly with SUPSI. In addition to IDSIA, in 2008, we created the Institute of Computational Science, which was then split into the Euler Institute , which focuses on simulations and calculations to address interdisciplinary scientific problems (physics, biology, medicine), and the Institute of Computing , which focuses mainly on the creation of new computational and data science methods that can be used by other researchers. This Institute was later joined by the Computer Systems Institute and the Software Institute , as well as the Law Institute ( IDUSI ) at USI and, more recently, Istituto di Ricerca solare Aldo e Cele Daccò ( IRSOL , affiliate).
