Welcome to the Factory Update for Fall 2024. Twice a year we take the time to present some of the projects we see coming out of our affiliated labs and give you a short summary of what we’ve been doing the past 12 months.

Please also give us a short feedback on what you most appreciate in our work.

Hands-on Workshops

During the last year we had various hands-on workshops where many of you participated:

• June – LLM fine-tuning pitfalls with Prof. Volkan Cevher – GitHub
• October – E-ID cryptography for privacy with Dr. Imad Aad – GitHub
• November – Deepfakes creation and detection with Prof. Touradj Ibrahimi

Showcase, Incubator, Market

Most of our work is done in the shadows, where we diligently work on looking at the most interesting projects from our affiliated labs. We start with the showcase, where we collect all relevant past and present projects. Then we choose some projects every year that we look at more closely in the incubator. This includes documenting, trying it out, and potentially writing a proof-of-concept based on a real-world use-case. The most interesting projects make it to the market where we support the project for at least 2 years and promote it to you.

Blog Posts

We also wrote blog-posts about our work at the Factory. Some are on a technical subject, while others present the work we did. You can find the full list here: Factory Blog Posts. Some of the highlights include:

• Empowering Digital Identities: The SSI Protocol Landscape
• Secure, Transparent, and Verifiable Elections: The D-Voting Project
• Testing TLS in local development

Various

There are various small tasks we’re doing throughout the year:

• Help setting up master-thesis projects for you, our partners
• Network and meet with the other Research Software Engineers at EPFL
• Supervise semester student projects to help us dive into specific technologies and projects
• Present our findings at conferences

Feedback

If you’re one of our partners, please take some time to give us a short feedback here: Feedback Form. And if you’re near EPFL, don’t hesitate to drop in for a coffee!

Showcase, Incubator, and Market

To help us find interesting projects for you, our partners, we keep a list of all past and present projects in the showcase. This list contains a short description of projects from our affiliated professors relevant to Digital Trust. For each project you’ll find a link to the paper, the code, if available, and an eventual demonstrator.

Every year we chose some of these projects to go to the incubator. This means our team looks at the code, propose changes, and document it. If we find a project with one of our partners, we also create a demonstrator, a proof-of-concept, to test how this project improves the workflow in a real-life setting.

The market contains libraries and projects we’re currently actively supporting with patches, documentation, and further development. Currently there is only one project in the market, the EPFL d-voting system, which started in prof. Bryan Ford’s lab, and has been used in various EPFL internal elections.

For all of these projects we’re happy to give you more information. Please reach out to us by sending an email to linus.gasser@epfl.ch.

And don’t forget to fill out our Feedback Form.

Selected Projects

The following four projects have been chosen by the Factory team. You can find more information for each of the projects by clicking on the card. Please let us know in the feedback form which one you’re most interested in, or send us an email.