wire - news in brief

GreenFjord is a four-year research program intended to investigate how climate change is affecting ecosystems in southern Greenland.

Every year over a billion tons of food worldwide are thrown away or perish, at a hefty environmental and climate cost.

Researchers at EPFL have uncovered a fundamental flaw in the training of machine learning systems and elaborated a new formulation for strengthening them against adversarial attacks.

EPFL is collaborating with academic and industrial partners to develop a cardiac intervention simulator. This platform is designed to train interventionalists in much the same way as flight simulators are used to train pilots. More and more cardiac interventions are now performed by inserting a small tube called a catheter into a blood vessel in the arm or groin, and from there into the heart chambers.

Physicist Lesya Shchutska, EPFL professor and winner of the Swiss Science Prize Latsis 2023, is paving the way for the discovery of new particles.

STUDENT PROJECTS - The Neosens project proposes a sepsis detection system for newborn babies in lowand middle-income countries, while MossStandard is developing a prototype of air purifier based on plant moss.

STUDENT PROJECT - Bénédicte Lunven just finished her bacherlor's degree and already has a foot in the sustainable economy door.

Platforms like ChatGPT are already changing the world. From healthcare to the arts and the way we work, how we can ensure AI and Machine Learning benefit all of society? World renowned experts have gathered at EPFL today to explore this topic.

For his semester's project, Constant Panisset is developing a cheap, robust and portable device that can turn water into a disinfectant via the principle of plasma activated water.

Master's project series (7). Donato Kofel has quantified the positive and negative effects of trees on outdoor air quality in Geneva Canton.

STUDENT PROJECT - As part of the Assistive Technologies Challenge, EPFL students developed two apps to help people with low or no vision: one app orally communicates the information contained in a box of medicine and the other helps them find empty seats on public transport.

STUDENT PROJECT - For her EPFL Master's project in civil engineering, Gaelle Abi Younes examined why on-demand buses have met with only limited success. She used technical and financial models to show how they could become a genuine alternative to cars in outlying areas. Thanks to the ubiquity of smartphones, we now have a wide range of on-demand services to choose from for traveling short distances: bike-sharing programs, ridesharing, Uber, Lyft and more.

STUDENT PROJECT - Charlyne Bürki explored the link between dementia and physical inactivity by comparing the results of subjective and objective studies. Her research uncovered some surprising findings - and led her to an indisputable conclusion.

The team of students is working on a unique prototype that uses graphene membranes combined with a porous, sponge-like material to pull carbon from the atmosphere.

STUDENT PROJECT - Intelligent robots - for search and rescue, exploration and surveillance - are a new and challenging field. Unique and versatile, could robot snakes advance the abilities of machines in these fields? Serpentine robots are a ground-breaking innovation in robotics. These flexible and slithering machines excel at navigating complex and confined spaces, offering immense potential in various fields.

Since the start of this year, a suite of instruments has been hard at work detecting a broad spectrum of aerosols at the MeteoSwiss weather station in Payerne, in Vaud Canton.

For their project -The Armenian presence at the Montreux Jazz Festival - A study of the Tigran Hamasyan Quintet concert in 2014-, Léandre Guy and Basile Tornare explored what exoticism means in music and the limits of genres.

STUDENT PROJECTS - Fourteen mechanical engineering students spent a semester getting inside the head of Leonardo da Vinci. Using his drawings from the 15th and 16th centuries, the teams built ingenious machines - altering the design in some cases - in order to better understand how they worked. The "Da Vinci Project," a concurrent engineering project devised by Prof. Pedro Reis, created a buzz of excitement among the three participating teams of final-year Bachelor's students.

EPFL spin-off Artiria has developed a wire with a guidable tip that makes it easier for neurosurgeons to navigate the dense network of cerebral arteries and get to the source of strokes.

EPFL conducted a survey of its community's health and well-being in November 2022, with the goal of pinpointing needs in this area and developing practical measures to address them.

ETH Zurich and EPFL want to work with partners from politics, science and industry to push innovative storage and transport solutions for renewable energy carriers.

Unconscious biases are formed by the culture and society we live in, along with our education and personal experiences.

Elythor, an EPFL spin-off, has developed a new drone whose wing shape can adapt to wind conditions and flight position in real time, reducing the drone's energy consumption.

EPFL, the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research (UNIDIR), the Geneva Graduate Institute and the Geneva Peacebuilding Platform have announced the launch of a PeaceTech Alliance.

The Canopy Pavilion uses hundreds of different interlinked panels to explore physical and mechanical properties never before employed in architecture.

Opening today, the new exhibition of EPFL Pavilions "Lighten Up! On Biology and Time" uses the lens of art to explore the connection of living organisms with the natural cycle of light and dark.

New imaging methods are being developed and adopted at a rapid pace in both research and industry. To equip EPFL graduates with the skills they'll need, the School's Center for Imaging is introducing a minor specifically in this area starting in the 2023-2024 school year.

UN International Day of Forests on 21 March is the perfect opportunity to showcase some of the important forest research being done at EPFL.

The environmental sustainability of up-and-coming technology is among the issues addressed by EPFL's International Risk Governance Center (IRGC). The Center aims to develop a number of best practices and decision-making guidelines in this area. Much of the new technology coming out of labs today is directly intended to protect the environment, whether by fighting climate change, preserving biodiversity or improving sustainability.

For the last four years at EPFL, a Master's course jointly run by the College of Management of Technology and the School of Engineering has been winning over students seeking a course that meets the needs of local industry.

AI chatbot ChatGPT exploded onto the scene in November 2022. It can write essays, WordPress plugins and even pass an MBA exam - yet scientists still don't fully understand how these general artificial intelligence programs work.

To build awareness about the importance of oceans, Sailowtech, a student association, has launched a project to develop low-tech methods for collecting data at sea.

It's International Women's Day 2023 and this year the focus is on innovation, technological change and education in the digital age for gender equality.