Read news from:
Austria
SHARE
COPY LINK

EPFL

EPFL combines art and science ‘under one roof’

Officials on Monday laid the first stone for a new 39-million-franc ($41-million) building at Lausanne’s federal institute of technology (EPFL) that aims to bring together science, art and “society”.

Published: 23 February 2015 20:08 CET
EPFL combines art and science 'under one roof'
Photo: Kengo Kuma & Associates

The Under One Roof building, designed by Japanese architect Kengo Kuma, is a narrow 275-metre-long structure with a traditional roof that is scheduled to be completed by autumn of 2016.

One part of the building will be dedicated to showcasing EPFL research projects, the institute announced.

Another part is earmarked as a laboratory to experiment with museum exhibition designs connected to digital humanities research projects at the school.

The planned Montreux Jazz Café at EPFL will occupy the southern part of the building, overlooking Lake Geneva.

In addition to being a place for visitors to relax, the café will also highlight the more than 5,000 hours of recordings from past editions of the annual Swiss jazz festival that were digitized by EPFL scientists.

“It will be the place where the digital humanities will show what they are doing,” EPFL President Patrick Aebischer told a televised press conference.

The building is being financed through an 18-million-franc federal government grant with the rest coming from sponsors.

Rolex, the Geneva-based luxury watch firm, the Fondation Gandur pour l’Art and a group of partners backing the Montreux Jazz Digital Project are together contributing 21 million francs.
 

Member comments

Log in here to leave a comment.
Become a Member to leave a comment.

EPFL

EXPLAINED: How will the post-lockdown tracing system work in Switzerland?

Given there is no Covid-19 vaccine at the present time, contact tracing is believed to be an effective, though complex, strategy for breaking transmission chains and controlling the spread of disease. How will it work in Switzerland?

Published: 20 April 2020 15:54 CEST
EXPLAINED: How will the post-lockdown tracing system work in Switzerland?
Research at EPFL will help establish a tracing system. Photo by Fabrice Coffrini / AFP

How does the tracking work?

The process involves identifying contaminated people, so that measures can be taken to prevent the spread of infection on to others.

It is all the more important in cases when the sick person has no symptoms and may not even know they are sick.

Once the infected person is identified, efforts are made to locate and test the people they have been in contact with within the past two weeks. If one of those contacts is found to be infected, the investigation starts again.

Trying to find chains of contamination could be a long process.

What are some of the challenges of contact tracing?

In Switzerland, as in many other countries, the challenge is to establish an effective tracking system, while respecting data protection.

Since mobile phones would be used, various technical and legal questions could arise, particularly on the collection and use of data.

In Switzerland, to process this information in the context of the pandemic, either the consent of the individual or an anonymisation of the data is required.

READ MORE: Swiss scientists launch a new app to collect Covid-19 data 

What tools will Switzerland be using for post-confinement contact tracing?

One possibility would be the tracking by GPS of mobile phones, as already implemented in a partnership between the federal government and Swisscom. This method allowed the authorities to monitor the public to see if they complied with the restrictions related to going out and traveling during the Easter holidays. 

But the government is now supporting a brand new project at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) and its sister institution, Zurich’s Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule (ETHZ).

Both are working on the so-called D3-PT project, a free downloadable application for mobile phones, which will run on Google’s Android operating system and on Apple’s iOS.

Its goal, according to Edouard Bugnion, professor of computer science at EPFL, is to “break the chain of virus transmission” by identifying new cases and isolating them. If a person is found positive for coronavirus, all the people he has encountered in the previous days will be alerted, so that they can go into quarantine and be tested. 

No exact details or launch date have been released yet, but the Federal Council thinks the D3-PT tracing would work well in Switzerland.

Will this system guarantee privacy?

Until very recently, the two institutions participated in the European research project Pan-European Privacy-Preserving Proximity Tracing, bringing together 130 organisations from eight countries.

But EPFL and ETHZ distanced themselves from this project after realising that user data would not be protected, and went on launch the D3-PT system which, they said, would be more “decentralised and transparent”.
 

SHOW COMMENTS