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Air Traffic Control in the US Still Runs on Windows 95 and Floppy Disks

This article highlights the alarming reliance of critical infrastructure on outdated technology, exposing significant vulnerabilities in essential systems. The need for uninterrupted operation and compatibility requirements presents major challenges to the modernization of these legacy systems, and the costs to upgrade are steep. Yet the potential for catastrophic failure due to obsolete equipment underscores the (…)

Summer Research Institute 2025

The Research Institute (SuRI) is an annual event that takes place at the School of Computer and Communication Sciences of the École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland. The workshop brings together researchers and experts from academia and industry for research talks and informal discussions.

Takeaways from our investigation on AI-powered school surveillance

Surveillance of children’s activities is being practiced by schools not only for security reasons but also with the intention of ensuring children’s well-being. On top of that, this article suggests that AI has unencrypted access to students’ activities and discussions. I like this article because it raises important concerns, poses open-ended questions, and sheds light (…)

U.S. officials say they still have not expelled Chinese telco hackers

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 (…)

Testing TLS in local development

TLS or Transport Layer Security is the cryptographic protocol that allows your internet connected devices to contact any website or any API or cloud service securely (over HTTPs). It adds privacy to your connection, by encrypting the transferred data, and more importantly helps your computer make sure that it’s talking to the right server, and (…)

Summer Research Institute 2024

The Research Institute (SuRI) is an annual event that takes place at the School of Computer and Communication Sciences of the École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland. The workshop brings together researchers and experts from academia and industry for research talks and informal discussions.

SURI – Summer Research Institute / Security and Privacy edition

The Summer Research Institute (SuRI) is an annual event that takes place at the School of Computer and Communication Sciences of the École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland.
This year the workshop will be bringing together 17 researchers and experts from academia and industry for research talks and informal discussions, including a poster session.

Exploring Artificial Intelligence to Predict Complications after Major Digestive Surgery

Major digestive surgery is associated with a high comorbidity (i.e. high risk of complications after surgery). Anticipating Postoperative complications (POC) may help and guide clinicians in the postoperative management of surgical patients. Unfortunately, the available tools in clinical practice are of restraint value due to their limited accuracy. Recently, artificial intelligence (AI) has shown a meteoric rise in medicine, showing numerous clinical applications but its role to predict POC remains unknown. We aim to use AI to develop new models allowing to improve the prediction of POC in a dataset of >2000 patients undergoing major digestive surgery.

Machine-Learning Prognostication in Patients Undergoing Surgery for Hepatocellular Carcinoma (Liver Cancer)

Liver cancer is the second deadliest malignancy. It essentially accounts hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC). Surgery with liver resection is the main curative option but unfortunately, it is only recommended in patients with early HCC. Prognosis of HCC is particularly challenging and results from numerous attempts using various strategies remain relatively poor.Artificial intelligence (AI) has demonstrated unmatched value to decipher complex traits and mechanisms. This multicentric effort will include 8 Academic centers from the United States, Europe and Asia, allowing to generate a large-scale dataset of patients undergoing liver resection for HCC. We aim to investigate the input of AI to improve prognostication of these patients.

Using Artifical Intelligence to Explore the Prognostic Value of Macroscopy in Liver Cancer

Liver cancer ranks third in terms of cancer-related mortality. Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) accounts for 90% of primary liver cancers. Tremendous efforts have been pursued to establish HCC prognostic, including clinical, radiological, pathological and even molecular readouts. Regardless of the strategy, the performance of these tools remains modest. Recent data using artificial intelligence (AI) on HCC histology (microscopy) have revealed promising results. We aim to submit pictures of liver cancers specimen to AI models to generate algorithms allowing to establish prognosis in a large-scale study including centers from North America, Europe and Asia.

ARNO: Adversarial robustness via Knowledge Distillation

State-of-the-art architectures for modulation recognition are typically based on deep learning models. However, recently these models have been shown to be quite vulnerable to very small and carefully crafted perturbations, which pose serious questions in terms of safety, security, or performance guarantees at large. While adversarial training can improve the robustness of the network, there is still a large gap between the performance of the model against clean and perturbed samples. Based on recent experiments, the data used during training could be an important factor in the susceptibility of the models. Thus, the objective of this project is to research the effects of proper data selection, cleaning and preprocessing of the samples used during training on robustness.

Demystifying the Commercial Potential of Privacy-Enhancing Technologies

By 2025 the total amount of data created, captured and consumed is predicted to reach 175 zettabytes. However, much of that data’s value is being wasted due to distrust, as there is fear that the data would be exposed when used, computed on or shared with collaborators, possibly leading to trade secrets being leaked or data protection legislation fines.

Vitalik’s answers to the big questions

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 (…)

12 Questions on the Digital Immunity Passport

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.

Prof. Jean-Pierre Hubaux’s opinion piece in ‘LeTemps” on Trusting SwissCovid App

French-language news paper ‘Le Temps’ published an opinion piece by C4DT’s Academic Director and Head of the LDS lab at EPFL, Jean-Pierre Hubaux, on trusting the SwissCovid app. Prof. Hubaux raises the point that the excessive focus on privacy protection has cast doubt on a tool which makes it possible to defend other rights. Read the article in French on ‘www.letemps.ch’ by clicking the following link.

Joint C4DT-CyberPeace Institute-CTEI conference on “Manipulating elections in cyberspace: are democracies in danger?”

Increasingly, reports warn that state-sponsored actors use social media to spread fake news/disinformation in order to sow distrust and create panic during pandemics and create discord and polarized opinions among people on political issues during democratic elections. Adding to this, social media platforms’ algorithms “add salt to the wound” by feeding their users posts which are aligned with their opinion in order to increase their screen time. How serious and how massive is the problem? What are its implications? And what can/should be done about it?

During this forum, organized jointly by the Center for Digital Trust (C4DT), the CyberPeace Institute and the Graduate Institute’s Centre for Trade and Economic Integration (CTEI) in Geneva, we will discuss not only the technological aspects of this phenomena, but also the regulatory role executive and legislative branches of governments should play. Societal, economical and geopolitical implications will also be debated. This event is open to the general public.

For more information please click below

SwissCovid: EPFL is working on the question of public acceptance of the SwissCovid application

Following the webinar SwissCovid (DP^3T project) – a proximity-tracing app against COVID-19: building trust in a technology solution organized today by C4DT, the explanations of journalist Marielle Savoy on the question of the population’s support for the Swisscovid application.
Click below to listen to the full report

Launch of the CyberPeace Institute in Geneva

Thursday 26 September 2019 saw the launch of the CyberPeace Institute, an independent NGO that will address the growing impact of major cyberattacks, assist vulnerable communities, promote transparency, and advance global discussions on acceptable behavior in cyberspace. EPFL President Martin Vetterli will be sitting on the Executive Board, and the Center for Digital Trust is named as a scientific partner.

The C4DT is looking forward to working with the @cyberpeaceinst led by @DuguinStephane and @MarietjeSchaake and supporting its mission to enhance the stability of #cyberspace. Please click below to access the official announcement.

C4DT Distinguished Lecture : Talk by Dr. Dan Bogdanov, Cybernetica, Estonia

In this talk, Dan Bogdanov will start by introducing secure computing technologies and their potential in enterprise and government use. He will then look at a focus group study of the barriers of adopting such technologies based on interviews in many industries.

September 4, 2019 @ 14:15 in BC 410

C4DT Distinguished Lecture : Hidden Backdoors in Deep Learning Systems

by Prof. Ben Zhao, Univ. of Chicago
The lack of transparency in today’s deep learning systems has paved the way for a new type of threats, commonly referred to as backdoor or Trojan attacks. In this talk, Ben Zhao will describe two recent results on detecting and understanding backdoor attacks on deep learning systems.
September 24th, 2019 @ 14:15, room BC 420

DataShare: Decentralized Privacy-Preserving Search Engine for Investigative Journalists

Kasra Edalatnejad presents DataShare, a decentralized and privacy-preserving global search system that enables journalists worldwide to find documents via a dedicated network of peers. This work stems from the need of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) for securing their search and discovery platform.
Wednesday, July 3rd 2019 @16:15, room BC 410

All Your Clicks Belong to Me: Investigating Click Interception on the Web

By Prof. Wei Meng, Chinese University of Hong Kong
Click is the prominent way that users interact with web applications. Attackers aim to intercept genuine user clicks to either send malicious commands to another application on behalf of the user or fabricate realistic ad click traffic. In this talk, Prof. Wei Meng investigates the click interception practices on the Web.
Tuesday July 23rd, 2019 @10:00, room BC 420