wire - news in brief

Technology has become critical in shaping our world today, especially in the digital age. It is integrated into almost every aspect of our lives, from smartphones to smart homes.

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.

Two research studies carried out at USI by Professor Piotr Didyk from the Faculty of Informatics were presented at ACM SIGGRAPH, the world's largest computer graphics conference.

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.

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.

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.

Large language models such as GPT-3 are able to learn new concepts by interacting with their users. Researchers at ETH and Google may now have uncovered a key mechanism behind this capability. Despite their huge success, the inner workings of large language models such as OpenAI's GPT model family and Google Bard remain a mystery, even to their developers.

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.

There are plenty of plant identification apps - but only few, that directly help research.

A new mobility app brings together public transport, micromobility solutions and private carpooling.

Mathematician Siddhartha Mishra has been awarded this year's Rössler Prize for his research on solutions for highly complex flow and wave phenomena.

During her doctoral studies, Liliane Ableitner developed a trading and billing tool for energy communities.

To date, inputting text in virtual reality has been difficult. Now researchers from the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science at the University of Basel have discovered a way to make the process easier - by adapting the principle of the swipe keyboard for the VR world. Until now, inputting text in virtual spaces - when searching for a digital exhibition or using a business application, for instance - meant typing in every single letter individually on a virtual keyboard.

Researchers from ETH Zurich created a new open-source platform and programming language called LMQL. This programming language makes it easier, cheaper, and safer to interact with large language models like ChatGPT. The language model ChatGPT is widely known by people in the tech community and the general public.

There are concerns that ChatGPT could undermine the educational system, and growing demands for rules governing its use.

Finally, a cat flap that prevents feline friends from bringing their prey indoors. Powered by artificial intelligence and backed by Swiss know-how and talent ETH Zurich start-up, Flappie Technologies is poised to become the cat's meow.

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.

Psychologist Verena Zimmermann joins computer scientists Joachim Buhmann and Elgar Fleisch to discuss whether our feelings can be measured, what role they play in human-machine interactions, and the use of smart technologies.

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.

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.

The LOOP Zurich research centre is creating a central platform for the exchange of health data between the University of Zurich, ETH Zurich and the four university hospitals. This will allow data to be utilised quickly and easily to the benefit of patients. When a patient is in intensive care, there are numerous instruments to monitor their state of health.

Waste causes problems not only on Earth, but also in space. A research team from the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts is currently developing a space debris detector. This can autonomously control satellites that are to clean up space in the future. Above our heads, there is a huge mess: In low-Earth orbits - about 800 km above the Earth - there are currently around 5,500 active and defective satellites orbiting.

Are we witnessing the rise of a different, adaptive artificial intelligence (AI) that works with humans and supports them with smart decisions? Computer scientist Niao He is investigating how this kind of AI can be theoretically underpinned so that it really does provide benefits. As a researcher, Niao He has both people and technology in mind.

We posed this question to researchers. In return, we got five intriguing answers from the perspectives of biomedicine, computer science, biology, robotics and philosophy. Life and death within us ''DNA is the building block of life. It contains all the information necessary for life, from reproduction and metabolism to growth and the ability to respond to stimuli.

Elvis Nava teaches robots to carry out oral and written commands. To this end, he sends them to "training camps" where they learn to combine image, text and motion data.

Researchers have teamed up with Dartfish and the Lausanne Hockey Club to push the boundaries of sports-performance analysis by applying computer vision and machine-learning technology to action on the ice. While there's no substitute for long hours of training, sports video analysis has become a must-have in the race for medals.

The federal government wishes to use data science in a more targeted way in the future to support the government and the administration in their work.

Professor John Ioannidis of Stanford University created a standardised index of the most influential researchers and published the results in the journal PLOS Biology. Several parameters, including the total number of citations and h-index, were taken into account for this calculation, leading to the calculation of an aggregate index.

The term "high-performance computer" already implies a high energy demand.