We’re eagerly gearing up for the third annual Summit of Centers this August 2025! This year’s spotlight is on collaborations with industry and private foundations. Stay tuned for announcements of our external guests!
Here is an article, in Cory Doctorow’s signature style, discussing social networks and what drives them and what makes people leave or stay. I like specifically how he dissects the way the once-good services these platforms used to provide got untethered from the profits their creators and CEOs were chasing over the years. Towards the (…)
The Ethics of Privacy and Surveillance by Carissa Véliz, Oxford University Press – 256 pages by Hector Garcia Morales “Privacy matters because it shields us from possible abuses of power”. Such a strong statement opens the introduction of the book, setting the grounds for the following pages. The thesis is that, in digital societies, there (…)
For a long time, Google dominated the search market, but this may be changing with new search habits emerging. Instead of googling multiple sites, I now primarily use two AI chatbots, challenge them to avoid hallucinations, and, if needed, click on their suggested links. For me, this is a more concise and much faster way (…)
In a sea of unsettling news, the US’s new Cyber Trust Mark labelling program is a welcome beacon of light. With consumers’ personal and home office spaces increasingly populated by connected devices, from door locks and doorbells, to baby monitors, vacuums, and TVs, the security of “smart home ecosystems” has never been more important. The (…)
Say cheese! This artist has created a whimsical website that allows New Yorkers to take selfies with traffic surveillance cameras installed all over the city. Maybe it can be used to track Santa’s whereabouts?
This article reveals how smart devices gather more information than typically required for their functions, including personal data, location, audio recordings … and this even for devices (like air fryers) that clearly do not require those. This (again) shows a lack of transparency and poses critical questions about consumer privacy.
I always supposed naively that once a breach in a system is detected, it will be fixed in a timely manner. Even more so if it’s in an important system from the government, like the networks used for data gathering of the telecommunication companies. Reality shows that even after many months, the FBI is still (…)
I like this article because it gives us a peek into how an organization develops responsibly and with intention an AI use policy aligned with its mission and operations. In this case, the stakes are high, as the International Committee of the Red Cross operates in conflict zones and humanitarian crises. They emphasize the importance (…)
This publication revisits key questions with speakers from the Oct 1st conference on “Deepfakes, Distrust and Disinformation” through the lens of public perception and seeks to advance the debate surrounding AI, misinformation, and disinformation, especially in political contexts.
Most people are nowadays aware of phishing attempts by e-mail and double-check an e-mails trustworthiness before clicking any links. But how many are just as cautious with their physical mail? This unusual campaign distributes its malware via the Swiss postal services. Phishing attempts by letter is definitely a new one for me, and a reminder (…)
I found this article fascinating since it highlights the complexity of defining what ‘open-source AI’ should mean. Today, it is a confusing topic, with many models being ‘open-source’ in name only. For neural networks, training data and source code are inseparable; together, they define how the model is programmed. Therefore, should we be allowed to (…)
EPFL and UNIL invite you to a special event on the theme of Artificial Intelligence on Saturday 23 November 2024 at the Rolex Learning Center.
A unique opportunity to better understand and embrace the AI revolution, while discussing the issues surrounding its use with an exclusive panel of scientists and experts. Laboratory demonstrations and workshops for adults and young people will also be on offer. The event is free of charge and open to all, aged 10 and over.
The Change Healthcare breach is deeply concerning, highlighting the vulnerabilities in centralized data systems used to protect sensitive healthcare information. The response to this illustrates a consistently reactive (rather than proactive) political action, where acceptable cybersecurity standards in legislation are only proposed after a significant data breach affects 100 million Americans.
The temporal evolution of the structure of dynamic networks carries critical information about the development of complex systems in various applications, from biology to social networks. While this topic is of importance, the literature in network science, graph theory, or network machine learning, still lacks of relevant models for dynamic networks, proper metrics for comparing network structures, as well as scalable algorithms for anomaly detection. This project exactly aims at bridging these gaps.
The main objective of the project is to perform online monitoring of technologies and technology actors in publicly accessible information sources. The monitoring concerns the early detection of mentions of new technologies, of new actors in the technology space, and the facts related to new relations between technologies and technology actors (subsequently, all these will be called technology mentions). The project will build on earlier results obtained on the retrieval of technology-technology actors using Large Language Models (LLMs).
The main objective of the project is to perform online monitoring of technologies and technology actors in publicly accessible information sources. The monitoring concerns the early detection of mentions of new technologies, of new actors in the technology space, and the facts related to new relations between technologies and technology actors (subsequently, all these will be called technology mentions). The project will build on earlier results obtained on the retrieval of technology-technology actors using Large Language Models (LLMs).
In this project we introduce a new family of prompt injection attacks, termed Neural Exec. Unlike known attacks that rely on handcrafted strings (e.g., “Ignore previous instructions and…”), we show that it is possible to conceptualize the creation of execution triggers as a differentiable search problem and use learning-based methods to autonomously generate them.
Aircraft and their ground counterparts have been communicating via the ACARS data-link protocol for more than five decades. Researchers discovered that some actors encrypt ACARS messages using an insecure, easily reversible encryption method. In this project, we propose BRUTUS, a decision-support system that support human analysts to detect the use of insecure ciphers in the ACARS network in an efficient and scalable manner. We propose and evaluate three different methods to automatically label ACARS messages that are likely to be encrypted with insecure ciphers.
Dating apps are out to debunk the well-known mantra “If you’re not paying for the product, then you are the product.”. Even if users are paying, these services goad users into paying ever more through a pay-to-play system. The promise of finding a soulmate, a design that keeps users hooked and black-box algorithms make up (…)
Wow – this is counter-attack made right! Sophos explains how they tracked hackers of their firewall product by adding code which tags attacks and reports them back to Sophos HQ. They managed to get a lot of information about the hackers, including their whereabouts. What I really liked about the article is how it shows (…)
This yearly Summit offers a unique platform for policymakers, business leaders, civil society, and academia to converge, exchange ideas, and collaboratively shape the future of AI policies.
Again, for all those of us who don’t mind being tracked ‘because I have nothing to hide’. This nicely shows how you can target specific communities with opposite ads, but to drive down the same point: don’t vote for that candidate. It strikes me because it is so clearly biased, not once, but twice…
