We are delighted to announce the startups MinWave and Predikon have each been awarded a CH 30k Ignition grant as part of EPFL’s Tech Launchpad – a leading incubator dedicated to supporting groundbreaking and innovative startups.
CLIs are very powerful, from the tip of fingers, you can quickly make the computer do anything you want. No need to wave your mouse around, hoping to find the right sub-sub-sub-menu where the feature you want is implemented. But it comes at a cost: for each command, you need to know how to write (…)
Les sociétés ELCA, Infomaniak ou encore Proton lancent un appel pour la création d’un consortium helvétique pour des services cloud. La décision de la Confédération de choisir des prestataires américains et chinois est vivement critiquée. More: https://www.letemps.ch/economie/partisans-dun-cloud-suisse-contreattaquent-ciblent-conseil-federal
I found this nice twitter thread from Vitalik Buterin, the inventor of the Ethereum blockchain: Doing a random twitter experiment just on this day. Only the 268 people I follow can reply to this tweet. Feel free to ask things and I'll talk about anything crypto or non-crypto related. — vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) September 1, 2021 (…)
NaCl is one of the most used cryptography library around, and it is understandable: it is easy to use (it hides the crypto-magic used), portable (via the libsodium fork), and available in many languages. It is used by one of the project we are helping, drop, written in Rust, which we want to partially run (…)
Concurrent programming is one the oldest and hardest issues in the Computer Science Book. For years, we have been using locks, big threads sharing the minimum, using optimistic reasoning for “how data will be updated”. And we are still stuck with the same issues of some part of the code “failing” to use the updated object, dead and soft locks with hard-to-see origins, and many many crashes.
The article Why Blockchain Is Not Yet Working goes over six points – for most of these points, research papers exist. For some of them test networks exist. Only one or two are solved in active main networks.
This conference will take place on October 15th, 9:00-17:00, at the Maison de la Paix of the Graduate Institute, Geneva (IHEID). It will address a number of key questions: How does a lack of digital trust manifest itself today? Is this justified, based on current privacy and security issues, or is it exaggerated? Understated? What lessons can be learned from other sectors on how to build the trust that will be needed for our digital future. What is possible in the digital future, and what will be lost without digital trust? And finally, how should that digital trust be built?
The event is jointly organised by IHEID’s Centre for Trade and Economic Integration (CTEI) and EPFL’s Center for Digital Trust (C4DT).
For more information click below.
To date the Pharma industry has not leveraged the wealth healthcare data volumes to deliver truly personalized care for patients.
On Monday 23rd of August the Applied Machine Learning Days (AMLD) hosts the AI & Pharma track, consisting of 4 sessions:
(i) methodological innovations in data science, ML and AI;
(ii) applications / use cases;
(iii) data sharing, ethics and privacy;
(iv) panel discussion on the adoption of AI in Pharma – solving the data Conundrum.
This track is co-organised by the Roche, Novartis and C4DT.
For more information click below.
Digital Twin technologies are gaining momentum in research and applications in health and industry on an international scale. EPFL and its partners are active in the development of related core technologies and their integrations, for instance via the CIS Research Pillars and DIGIPREDICT.
To promote research and education in cyber-defence, EPFL and the Cyber-Defence Campus have jointly launched the “CYD Fellowships – A Talent Program for Cyber-Defence Research.” The fourth call for proposals is now open with a rolling call for Master Thesis Fellowship applications, and with a deadline of 16 August 2021 for Doctoral and Distinguished Postdoctoral Fellowship applications. CYD fellows are hosted by a higher education institution in Switzerland and conduct their research at the CYD Campus located on the premises of EPFL and ETHZ and in its office in Thun. For more details visit the program’s dedicated website by clicking the link below or join the online Applicant Workshop on 5 August 2021 from 10.00 to 10.45 CEST (for more information please contact research@epfl.ch).
C4DT affiliated Associate Professor Katerina Argyraki works on computer networks and neutrality, a notion she believes is critical to ensuring that the internet continues to foster competition and innovation.
Trust in Innovation is a 100% digital event that will take place on June 16th , 2021. It targets SMEs wanting to understand and adopt new technologies such as Blockchain, Artificial Intelligence and Quantum Computing. It promises no sales speech but pedagogy and ROI. The key themes treated during the event are traceability, compliance, healthcare and tokenisation.
For more information click below.
C4DT-affiliated Prof. Touradj Ebrahimi participated on May 31st at the congress WXRShow in Crans-Montana, Switzerland, to discuss the future of non-fungible tokens (NFTs). The event was covered by Swiss bi-weekly newspaper Agefi. Click below to view the article in French.
Women in Cyber is specifically targeted towards women in security. It will be held virtually on June 10th and will be made up of a number of presentations from women across Switzerland who work in this field, from NCSC, SWITCH, Deloitte, Kudelski Security, ETH, Microsoft, Swiss Re, UBS and Trend Micro. It will close with an address from our Federal Councilor and Head of the Department of Defense, Viola Amherd.
Every year, they bring together business leaders, policy makers, general counsels, advocates, technologists, academics, government representatives, and journalists from around the world to tackle the most pressing issues at the intersection of human rights and technology. Join RightsCon for their 10th anniversary event online from Monday, June 7 to Friday, June 11, 2021.
The variety of dependencies in modern IT systems provides several advantages, but also has a strong impact on the security and resilience of these systems. A number of recent incidents, such as the “SolarWinds attack” on US governmental agencies, underline the difficulty of securing systems that are composed of various apparently independent components.
How aware are organisations of their IT dependencies? How do they manage them? How are dependencies taken into account in the decision process? The goal of this workshop is to gather experiences, and to present approaches that tackle these dependency issues, from theoretical and practical points of view.
This event is organized by the Swiss Support Center for Cybersecurity (SSCC), in collaboration with the Center for Digital Trust (C4DT) at EPFL and the Zurich Information Security Center (ZISC) at ETHZ.
For more information click below.
Today, it’s often more cost-effective to host services in the cloud instead of in its own premises. But how protected is our sensitive data in the cloud? We readily encrypt data in storage and protect it while in transit. But what about when data is “in use”? It is a legitimate concern in increasingly cloud-dominated infrastructures. Moreover, how to make sense of the different laws governing the sensitive data?
During this week we will explore how privacy-enhancing computation technologies complement a zero-trust strategy by addressing the vulnerability of data in use in the cloud. We will also discuss the legal framework which is required to balance economical interest of companies with the individual’s data privacy concerns.
For more information click below
The certificate linked to the virus will not be available before June in Switzerland. Until then, here are twelve answers linked to questions of security, data and accessibility concerning what some call the “Immunity Passport”. In particular, Jean-Pierre Hubaux, C4DT Academic Director, provides insights on the questions linked to data.
There is much debate about the use of digital immunity passports as a response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Such digital tools to certify immunity could help spur economic recovery, but raise ethical and privacy concerns. How to build trust in such a solution? What elements make them interoperable among countries? How is people’s data related to their immunity status governed?
A panel of prominent specialists will discuss these and other questions from 4 different angles – ethical, business, political/governance and scientific – during a two-hour moderated discussion.
For more information click below.
On the 7th of March, the Swiss population voted on a ban for full face coverings, the e-ID Act, and an economic partnership agreement with Indonesia. As with all Swiss referendums since 2019, the EPFL election prediction tool Predikon generated real-time predictions for the vote outcomes.
Digital activities represent around 4-5% of CO2 emissions, estimate several studies. And cryptocurrencies, like Bitcoin, are amongst the most energy consuming activities: far ahead of streaming and email exchanges. The podcast “Le Point J” tries to understand why.
In communication systems, there are many tasks, like modulation recognition, for which Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) have obtained promising performance. However, these models have been shown to be susceptible to adversarial perturbations, namely imperceptible additive noise crafted to induce misclassification. This raises questions about the security but also the general trust in model predictions. In this project, we propose to use adversarial training, which consists of fine-tuning the model with adversarial perturbations, to increase the robustness of automatic modulation recognition (AMC) models. We show that current state-of-the-art models benefit from adversarial training, which mitigates the robustness issues for some families of modulations. We use adversarial perturbations to visualize the features learned, and we found that in robust models the signal symbols are shifted towards the nearest classes in constellation space, like maximum likelihood methods. This confirms that robust models not only are more secure, but also more interpretable, building their decisions on signal statistics that are relevant to modulation recognition.
Cyber security information is often extremely sensitive and confidential, it introduces a tradeoff between the benefits of improved threat-response capabilities and the drawbacks of disclosing national-security-related information to foreign agencies or institutions. This results in the retention of valuable information (a.k.a. as the free-rider problem), which considerably limits the efficacy of data sharing. The purpose of this project is to resolve the cybersecurity information-sharing tradeoff by enabling more accurate insights on larger amounts of more relevant collective threat-intelligence data.
This project will have the benefit of enabling institutions to build better models by securely collaborating with valuable sensitive data that is not normally shared. This will expand the range of available intelligence, thus leading to new and better threat analyses and predictions.
