News

The review paper of Claudio Bruschini and Edoardo Charbon entitled “Single-photon avalanche diode imagers in biophotonics : review and outlook” has been selected as one of the Light: Science & Applications 20 top downloaded papers for the year 2020.

Christian Enz, director of the Integrated Circuits Laboratory at the School of Engineering, and Arnout Beckers, a PhD student, were awarded a prize for their research entitled Theoretical Limit of Low-Temperature Subthreshold Swing in Field-Effect Transistors 

EPFL scientists have developed a chemical method for targeting the effects of cancer-fighting immunotherapy drugs only to the tumor tissue, making the drugs less toxic to the rest of the human body.

Valérie Geneux, the journalist responsible for covering the news of the School of Engineering, was awarded the second "Best Young Journalist Prize" by the Centre de Formation au Journalisme et aux Médias

The successful deployment of solar power will depend on many factors, including how well grid operators are able to balance supply and demand in order to incorporate renewable energy into their low-voltage grids. An EPFL PhD thesis looks at how power utilities can promote flexibility to achieve that goal.

Professor Giovanni De Micheli, head of the Integrated Systems Laboratory (LSI) at the School of Engineering, has been awarded with the 2021 IEEE TCCPS Technical Achievement Award "For sustained contributions to smart sensors, wearable and implanted electronics, and cyber-medical systems."

Two EPFL scientists – Georg Fantner, an associate professor, and Andrew Oates, the dean of the School of Life Sciences – recently published an article on how open science can be leveraged further in order to share discoveries and know-how with the scientific community.

EPFL engineers are pioneering an energy-saving technology that uses fiber optics to boost the performance of supercomputers.

As part of the Asclepios project, a simulated mission to the Moon run by EPFL students, six would-be astronauts spent over a week living on a mock lunar base. Their extraterrestrial habitat was actually right here on Earth – at the Grimsel Test Site, to be precise. Here we look back on an adventure that was (almost) out of this world.

Thanks to their swimming robot modeled after a lamprey, EPFL scientists may have discovered why some vertebrates are able to retain their locomotor capabilities after a spinal cord lesion. The finding could also help improve the performance of swimming robots used for search and rescue missions and for environmental monitoring.

A team of EPFL engineers, in association with local businesses and authorities, are testing novel algorithms for the deployment of greener EV fast-charging stations.

An EPFL scientist has found that brain fingerprints – or maps of the neural connections within our brain – can be used to detect a decline in cognitive ability. That’s because the fingerprints are harder to detect in people who already have mild cognitive impairment.

Engineers at EPFL’s DESL lab, working in association with EPFL spin-off Swisspod, have built a Hyperloop test track on the Lausanne campus. They will use the loop – a large vacuum tube for ultra-high-speed travel – to test a linear induction motor. The research is being funded by an Innosuisse grant.

Professor and Dean of the School of Engineering Ali H. Sayed, has been awarded the 2022 IEEE Fourier Award for Signal Processing “for contributions to the theory and practice of adaptive signal processing”.

Josephine Hughes, a recently appointed professor of robotics at EPFL’s School of Engineering, has developed robots with the potential to change our lives. We sat down for a chat with this ambitious inventor.

The Board of the Swiss Federal Institutes of Technology has announced the appointment of professors at EPFL's School of Engineering.

SUMMER SERIES: HOW SCIENCE WORKS

For scientists, the path from bright idea to finished product is a long one. Prototypes must go through an extensive testing and approval process before they are ready for the market. Let’s have a look.

Hervé Bourlard, Professor at the School of Engineering and Director of the Idiap Research Institute, has been awarded the IEEE James L. Flanagan Speech and Audio Processing 2022 Prize.

EPFL students have made a high-performance 3D printer that can print structures measuring just a few microns across.

Giancarlo Ferrari Trecate, head of Dependable Control and Decision group at the School of Engineering, founded the Control Systems Society Chapter of the IEEE Swiss Section and was appointed its chair.

EPFL and the Paul Scherrer Institute (PSI) join forces to establish a new PSI research division: Scientific Computing, Theory, and Data.

Scientists from EPFL and University of Bern have successfully implanted – in vivo – their first artificial tubular muscle that augments the aorta and assists cardiac function in pumping blood. Based on these results, the Werner Siemens Foundation has provided the green-light for granting an extra 8 million CHF over 8 years to develop artificial muscles for human disorders.

The paper entitled “High-Performance Enhancement-Mode AlGaN/GaN Multi-Channel Power Transistors” presented by Luca Nela from the School of Engineering's POWERlab has received the Charitat Award at the 33rd International Symposium on Power Semiconductor Devices and ICs (ISPSD 2021), held in Nagoya, Japan. This is the second Charitat Award in a row after the previous one at ISPSD 2020 in Vienna with the paper “High-Frequency GaN-on-Si power integrated circuits based on Tri-Anode SBDs” also by Luca Nela, Elison Matioli, and co-authors from the POWERlab.

Each year, the Section of Materials Science and Engineering and the Institute of Materials of the School of Engineering awards its “prix des matériaux” to a student of the upper secondary school for an interdisciplinary work of maturity, related to materials science.

Scientists at EPFL and the University of Warwick have used a virus to identify a peptide that can serve the same function as antifreeze proteins. By preventing ice formation, the compound could play a key role in preserving cells and organ transplants and in food conservation.

While it is important for students to work in groups during their studies, that is not enough for them to acquire many of the transversal skills needed in the professional world. A recent EPFL study highlights the need for engineering courses to explicitly address professional skills through a combination of theory and feedback.

EPFL engineers have developed a neural interface that disappears harmlessly in the body after several months and allows natural tissue to grow back. What’s more, it can be implanted in a patient’s blood vessel rather than inside the brain, thereby avoiding the need for invasive surgery.

EPFL scientists in a European collaboration propose a personalized protocol for optimizing stimulation of optic nerve fibers, for the blind, which takes into account feedback from the viewer’s brain. The protocol has been tested on artificial neural networks known to simulate the physiology of the entire visual system, from the eye to the visual cortex. The stimulation protocol will be tested in clinical trials with partners in Rome.

EPFL has just opened a new imaging center to serve as a hub for state-of-the-art technology in imaging systems. The only one of its kind in Switzerland, the center pools the imaging expertise that is currently housed at nearly a hundred laboratories in five EPFL schools. The goal is to facilitate cross-disciplinary research and anchor EPFL’s position at the cutting edge of imaging technology for research applications.

Clara Moldovan, a scientist in the Nanoelectronic Devices Laboratory of the Faculty of Engineering, has just received funding for her research entitled "SmartEnergy - Nanocarbon Energy Storage Integrated with Piezoelectric Energy Source for Smart Factory Applications".

The difficulty of programming robots makes the technology inaccessible to many companies, especially the small batch manufacturers that define Swiss industry. AICA, a new AI-driven software co-founded by Professor Aude Billard, Lukas Huber, and Dr. Baptiste Busch, aims to change that.

Engineers at EPFL and École Polytechnique in France analyzed the friction between pages in a book and the mechanical force needed to bend them. Drawing on their experiments, they developed a new theoretical model for predicting the elasto-frictional behavior of stacked layers.

In June 2021, Droople entered a partnership with the Embedded Systems Laboratory (ESL) at the School of Engineering and the ALTIS Group (Valais) to implement the joint Research and Development project WaSTeLeSS. The project is planned to run until 2023 and achieve significant water savings in buildings through an advanced monitoring system based on distributed intelligence. 

Professor Silvestro Micera, from the School of Engineering’s Translational Neural Engineering Lab (TNE), has been awarded the 2021 EMBS Technical Achievement Award.

EPFL scientists have made an important discovery about the structure of barium titanate, a material used in everyday objects. Their findings refute existing theories on the displacement of the material’s atoms. 

Researchers at EPFL have developed a technology based on nanophotonics and data science to detect and monitor cancer biomarkers at an early stage. Their research is published in Nature Communications.

EPFL researchers have developed a device that can continuously measure the blood concentration of propofol – one of the main compounds used in anesthetics – in patients as they’re being operated on. That will help anesthesiologists deliver more personalized doses.

The Swiss Solar Boat is the first solar-powered boat designed entirely by EPFL students. Modeled after a Polynesian canoe, it will compete in the upcoming Monaco Solar & Energy Boat Challenge and, for the first time, have a pilot on bord.

The vast majority of drugs on the market are poorly soluble, meaning that their ability to dissolve in a solvent is not optimal, which causes them to be poorly absorbed, behave unpredictably, and may even induce an undesirable immune response. The EPFL startup Oryl Photonics composed of has tackled this problem by developing a novel device to rapidly and efficiently measure the solubility of substances at an affordable price. A very worthwhile workaround, given that in Switzerland one in two people over the age of 15 takes at least one medicine every week! Such is the importance of the solution developed by Oryl Photonics, which FIT is now supporting with a Tech Seed loan of CHF 100’000.

EPFL scientists have discovered that an engineered interleukin-10-Fc fusion protein can boost the effectiveness of exhausted T lymphocytes – our body’s immune cells for fighting cancer, by reprograming their metabolism. 

Engineers at EPFL have developed a predictive control model that allows swarms of drones to fly in cluttered environments quickly and safely. It works by enabling individual drones to predict their own behavior and that of their neighbors in the swarm.

Digital twins – a savvy combination of artificial intelligence and personal data – have already begun to revolutionize the way healthcare is provided. But they raise a lot of ethical and legal questions, especially given the vast amounts of medical data that must be collected to train artificial intelligence algorithms. So should we be worried about the eventuality of a digital clone? We spoke with experts from a variety of fields to find out.

A cryogenic controller chip opens the door to solving the ‘wiring bottleneck’ and subsequently to realize a fully integrated, scalable quantum computer.

EPFL researchers have developed a light-based approach to read out superconducting circuits, overcoming the scaling-up limitations of quantum computing systems.

Starting 18 May, a high-powered laser will be installed on the summit of Säntis. It aims at evaluating the feasibility of a laser lightning rod.

The 3^rd annual PhD Summit, on the theme of “Engineering for Sustainability”, will be held on October 25-27, 2021. Register now to compete for the PhD Summit prize, present your research work and interact with the top engineering faculty members.

“I will be an engineer!” is a quadrilingual (French, German, Italian and English) video campaign that pulls together the story of six very individual journeys of EPFL Bachelor’s and Master’s students from the School of Engineering into one narrative. Join our students, who invite us to explore their thoughts and experiences on what it is like to study engineering at EPFL, from what led them to deciding to join EPFL to what they wish for themselves as future engineers. This campaign is the result of a close collaboration between the Education Outreach Department and the School of Engineering.

Antibody testing can be a powerful tool for tracking the spread of SARS-CoV2 infections, the virus responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic. A group of scientists from EPFL, UNIGE and HUG have now developed a reliable and cheap antibody test that can analyze more than 1,000 samples at once and requires a small drop of blood, such as that from a finger prick.

The 10th edition of Startup Champion Seed Night is taking place this Thursday, 29 April 2021. Nicolas Durand, CEO of Abionic – an EPFL spinoff that specializes in rapid testing based on nanofluid technology – looks back on his involvement in the competition’s first edition in 2012 and how his company has developed over the past decade.

With the idea to promote and encourage collaboration among scientists, the College of Management of Technology (CDM) has initiated a new Interdisciplinary Strategy to seed new collaborative research ties between key research areas of the College and other research domains present at EPFL.
This strategic program aims both at boosting the huge potential of interdisciplinary projects which already feature at EPFL and at fostering the integration of the College on the EPFL campus.