Patrick Aebischer, president of EPFL and Jacques Melly, president of the Valais cantonal council, sign an agreement of understanding 10 January to set up a branch of the polytechnic in Valais
LAUSANNE, SWITZERLAND – Canton Vaud’s federal polytechnic institute, EPFL and canton Valais signed an agreement of intention Tuesday 10 January in Sion to establish a branch of the school in canton Valais, most likely in Sion but working closely with a number of existing services throughout the canton.
A formal agreement and plans will be developed later in the year, but EPFL President Patrick Aebischer is quoted by Le Nouvelliste as saying the new campus should be up and running by 2015.
The new branch of EPFL will have have 11 research and training chairs, the canton and EPFL announced at a press conference Tuesday.
Valais will have a teaching campus that focuses on energy, health and chemistry, according to Le Nouvelliste, with seven chairs in energy and the rest in bio-technology and bio-engineering, while Le Temps reports that four chairs will be in energy and the others in biotechnology and medical engineering.
EPFL has not yet issued a press release confirming details but Valais, for its part, says the focus will be on energy, health (with a focus on rehabilitation) and nutrition and the new school should help attract international companies. Nutrition studies would centre around work to produce components for vitamins and medicines.
A masters degree in energy is being planned.
EPFL is based in Lausanne but has a small campus in Neuchatel for nanotechnology.
LAUSANNE, SWITZERLAND – Some 350 students unexpectedly had a free hour, but out in the chilly November air Wednesday morning after an industrial vacuum cleaner caught fire at a school in Payerne, canton Vaud.
The machine filled the Derrière la Tour secondary school with smoke at 08:30 and students were ordered to leave. An hour later the building had been aired and they were allowed back in, but investigators are checking to see what caused the fire.
Winners include 16-year-old Vaud musical prodigy Mélodie Zhao
Mélodie Zhao, Leenaards Foundation scholarship winner
LAUSANNE, SWITZERLAND – The Leenaards Foundation has given CHF500,000 in prizes and scholarships to encourage artists in the region. One of the winners is 16-year-old Mélodie Zhao of Saint Prex, who last summer became the youngest ever person to receive a master’s degree in music from the Geneva Conservatory.
She will use her CHF50,000 scholarship to pursue private studies with Pascal Devoyon and other renowned professors around the world. Zhao began playing piano at age 3, gave her first concert at age 5 and began performing with orchestras at age 9. She will join post-graduate piano classes at the University of Arts in Berlin and post-grad classes in orchestra conducting, in Geneva in addition to training with mentors such as Devoyon.
The foundation was created in 1980 by a Belgian couple, Antoine and Rosy Leenaards, who made their fortune then retired to Switzerland. Their only son and heir died at age 58 and the couple created the foundation in his memory with CHF230,000. By the time Antoine died 15 years later he left a fortune worth CHF325 million to the foundation, which annually gives awards to encourage the cultural life of the region.
Three prizes worth CHF30,000 each, in recognition of a career, were given Tuesday evening to:Jacqueline Veuve, filmmaker, André Corboz, architectural and urban historian, and Jean Scheurer, painter.
Eight scholarships worth CHF50,000 each were awarded to young people at a crucial point at the start of their careers, to help them continue developing. This year’s winners, in addition to Zhao:
Antoinette Dennefeld, mezzo-soprano, Douna Loup, writer, Sylvie Neeman Romascano, writer and editor, Mélodie Zhao, pianist, Frédéric Cordier, artist, Guy-François Leuenberger, pianist-composer, Michael Rampa, painter and Adrien Rovero, industrial designer.
Zhao is young, but she has already made a name for herself; her most recent concert at Victoria Hall in Geneva 12 October in commemoration of the 200th birthday of Liszt, was sold out and she has recently completed a new recording, her second: Douze Etudes d’exécution transcendante de Liszt (Claves label). Her first recording at age 13: the 24 Etudes de Chopin. The Leenaards Foundation notes that her new “interprétation is recognized for its perfect virtuosity and profound musicality”.
Background, “Prodigy M Zhao gives rare Chopin complete Etudes concert”, GenevaLunch 28 February 2010
Tunnel-FET technology set to take over from field effect
Tactile screens also on the way
Adrian Ionescu of the EPFL nanoelectronic devices lab
LAUSANNE, SWITZERLAND – Computers, cell phones and other electronic devices could be using 100 times less energy starting in just six years, an EPFL researcher in Lausanne writes in a special issue of Nature devoted to transistors, published Tuesday 22 November.
The key: moving from today’s field effect technology to tunnel-FET technology.
Adrian Ionescu is head of the Guardian Angels mega research project, a finalist for a European Union one billion grant. The project aims to design ultra-miniaturized, zero-power electronic personal assistants for a variety of applications, including healthcare.
Tunnel-FET technology is one of the first major stages in the project’s roadmap.
“For research and industry, the power consumption of transistors is a key issue. The next revolution will likely come from tunnel-FET, a technology that takes advantage of a phenomenon referred to as ‘quantum tunneling’, the Lausanne polytechnic institutes says in a statement issued Tuesday. Ionescu’s article focuses on work at the EPFL and in IBM laboratories in Zurich and the CEA-Leti in France, all of which are taking part in Guardian Angels.
Field effect technology, used in today’s transistors, is fast approaching its limits, especially for power consumption, according to the EPFL. With field effect, voltage induces an electron channel that activates the transistor.
Today’s computers have a billion transistors in the central processing unit, the CPU, alone: small switches that turn on and off to provide binary instructions, the 0s and 1s that tell our devices to send e-mails, watch videos and so much more.
Tunnel-FET technology is based on a “fundamentally different principle”
GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – The first Confucius Institute in Switzerland opened in October at the University of Geneva but last week courses officially opened in the master’s degree students, accompanied by a meeting between Ji Baocheng, president of the University of Renmin, China, and Pierre Willa, head, International Relations Office, University of Geneva.
The Confucius Institute of University of Geneva is working in partnership with Renmin University in Beijing and Hanban; the University of Geneva is supporting research projects and organizing workshops and conferences. It will also act as a teaching and research centre on contemporary China, says the university.
The new Institute is one of more than 350 in 104 countries.
LAUSANNE, SWITZERLAND – Peugeot-Citroën Thursday became the 11th major firm to join the Innovation Square on the EPFL campus, the first company from the car industry to bring in a large research and development budget, according to the universiy. The square opened in August 2010.
The group said in a press release 3 November that “The mission of this innovative structure is to foster a long-term vision for PSA Peugeot Citroën’s products and services.” The new unit is called StellaLab@EPFL.
The polytechnic made world headlines 28 September when it announced that new research with Nissan is studying the brain-computer interface and looking at the option of a computer-piloted car. Then 28 October it announced that, working with a French company, it had solved a major problem for compressed air cars by reducing charging time.
“EPFL conducts a great deal of research that is of interest to the auto industry, in a wide range of different fields,” it says in a 3 November press release. “For example, the Materials Sciences and Engineering Institute works to create light, sturdy composites; several robotics-oriented laboratories are designing and producing all sorts of mechanisms to help with driving and move toward ever-increasing comfort and safety for users and their environment; and there are a large number of projects that aim to replace fossil fuels in the transportation systems of the future, both by storing energy in various forms (new electric batteries, hydrogen, and even compressed air) and by using it with greater efficiency.”
Wearing your heart on your sleeve to take on a new meaning
LAUSANNE, SWITZERLAND – A tiny new device could soon provide real-time heart monitoring that might help prevent some of the 70-100,000 deaths annually from sudden onset heart attacks. The new tool has yet to be tested in real-life conditions, but cardiologists are enthusiastic about its potential, says EPFL, which developed the medical tool. It is one of several “wireless body sensor networks” (WBSN) tools being developed at the polytechnic university in Lausanne, as part of the huge Guardian Angels project, selected as one of six finalist mega-research projects by the European Union (winner to be announced in 2012).
The project is also looking at similar monitoring systems for other health problems, such as the immediate impact of diet on obese patients.
The device consumes very little electricity and is made up of high-precision body sensors applied to the skin, a ZigBee radio module and a chip that’s optimized for analyzing and processing biological signals.It monitors the heart and detects anomalies, immediately alerting the patient’s cell phone in the case of a problem. Medical personnel are immediately alerted by e-mail and message.
“This system collects very reliable and precise data, it’s equipped with a very effective noise filtering system, and it has batteries that can last for 3-4 weeks at a time,” notes EPFL professor David Atienza, head of EPFL’s Embedded Systems Lab. “Above all it provides an automatic analysis and immediate transmission of data in compressed format to the doctor, preventing him or her from having to work through hours of recorded data.”
Member of British House of Lords Michael Bates
GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – Students at the International School of Geneva are having an eventful week before breaking up Friday for a holiday week: an inspiring visit from Lord Michael Bates of the British Parliament Wednesday is being followed by the inauguration of a major building project for a new primary school in Founex which opened in September.
Bates, whose Walk for Truce is taking him on foot some 4,800km around the world, is determined to get nations to act on a UN resolution signed in October 2011, namely to use the 2012 London Olympics to take one active step each to promote peace.
The resolution has been signed before each Olympics Game, since 1993, when the practice was revived by the International Olympic Committee.
The British member of the House of Lords would like to see it become more than a handsome gesture, he says.
He met with middle school students, ages 9-12, from the campus at La Grande Boissière to give them pointers on how they can help encourage their governments to take concrete steps.
Bates notes on his Walk for Truce web site that 193 nations come together to sign:
“a Resolution declaring their commitment to observe to “pursue initiatives for peace and reconciliation in the spirit of the Ancient Games”—in the past everyone has signed it but no one has ever implemented it. We think that is a missed opportunity. We want to see the Resolution brought into reality. I have decided to walk over 3000 miles in the hope that we can persuade all signatories to the Truce to do just one thing to implement it. Not only would this bring the flame of hope into conflict zones around the world it would mean that we would rediscover the central purpose of the Ancient Games which was to provide for a pause in the endless cycle of violence through the observance of the Sacred Truce. If they could do it 3000 years ago, then surely we can do it now.”
The International School, which has grown to 4,300 students from 125 countries with the addition of a new primary school this year, Thursday celebrates the official inauguration of the school at the La Chataigneraie campus. The campus now has 1,400 students and will gradually add another 300 students in Founex, which will have a significant impact on the recent shortage of places in international schools in the region.
Young Swiss professionals best in Europe at WorldSkills 2011
LONDON, ENGLAND – Switzerland is the top European country and third in the world for professional skills training, based on gold and silver medals won at the WorldSkills competition which just closed in London 10 October. Fifty-three nations took part in the competition, which runs every two years and is open to professional workers under age 22.
The Swiss Federal Department of the Economy notes in a statement that the awards support Switzerland’s approach to professional training and education, with its emphasis on internships in order to master skills.
Two out of three Swiss teenagers opt for professional training programmes, rather than university studies.
Young workers from 53 countries competed at WorldSkills 2011
Switzerland entered young people from 60 professions who had competed at the regional and national level.
Nearly 1,000 young workers from around the world competed to show their talents in a wide range of professional skills, from automobile painting to carpentry and IT. Switzerland won 6 gold, 5 silver and 6 bronze medals.
Swiss team and their professional skills
LAUSANNE, SWITZERLAND – Philippe Gugler, the vice-rector of the University of Fribourg has resigned, the university announced 3 October, in the wake of an investigation into plagiarism. Gugler was the subject of an inquiry that began in August after he was accused of laxity in checking the originality of papers where he was listed as co-author.
Eight pages out of 1,800 published during his nine years with the university did not cite the original sources, says the university.
Hiking near the Jungfraujoch (baby gets a backpack ride), August 2011
ZURICH, SWITZERLAND – WWF, the environmental organization, and Switzerland’s largest supermarket chain, Migros, are joining forces to help children learn more about and appreciate the Swiss Alps. Mountainmania is a seven-week online quiz programme that kicks off 13 September, designed to teach children more about the Alps.
The two organizations are ready to hand out 50,000 diplomas to “mountain champions” who correctly complete the quiz.
“We need to take care of our Alps,” says WWF chief executive Hans-Peter Fricker. “We’ll only be able to do this if we instill a love for the mountains in children, starting as early as possible.”
Migros will be featuring its bio brands during this period, aiming to increase their sales by 10 percent during the seven weeks. The mountainmania albums that are sold will contribute CHF1 per album to WWF Alpine projects that include restoring areas of the Rhone and Rhine rivers to natural habitats for trout and beavers, and helping encourage the natural return of large carnivores to their Alpine habitats.
Zurich, one of three Swiss cities that will benefit from new jobs
ZURICH, SWITZERLAND – The QS World University Rankings 2011-2012, published independently since 2010 and considered one of the main global education ranking systems, show EPFL in Lausanne slipping from slot no. 32 to 35, but ETHZ in Zurich holding its no. 18 place, just behind McGill in Canada and ahead of Duke in the US.
EPFL has gone up slightly with Leiden and remained at the same level with the Shanghai rankings in recent years, while since ETHZ has held steady with QS and Shanghai but gone up with Leiden. EPFL offers 20 programmes and ETHZ 44.
Swiss state universities that are given a world ranking: The University of Geneva is ranked 71, Basel University 137, Bern 162, Zurich 101.
The QS system was originally published jointly by universities by Quacquarelli Symonds, a UK-based company, jointly with Times Higher Education (THE), but the two split in 2010 to use different methodologies for determining rankings. The new QS system should not be confused with the older THE-QS World University Rankings.
THE publishes its new rankings in October.
Other major rankings systems, most of which show some national bias: Shanghai Jiao Tong, The CHE Ranking, The Leiden Ranking, CHE EUSID, Newsweek, several Financial Times specialty rankings, and the Karriere Hochschulranking.
The Swiss education department publishes a useful web site in four languages (including English) with a searchable data base of all the rankings for comparative purposes.
Highlights of the new QS rankings include:
- Cambridge is number 1 but close behind are Harvard, MIT, Yale and Oxford for the top five
- The top 10 are all US or UK universities
- Chinese mainland universities are inching up, with two of them, Peking and Tsinghua, in the top 50
School is starting: watch out for little people crossing the road!
LAUSANNE, SWITZERLAND – Cantons Geneva and Vaud are back in school today, 29 August, and police are reminding motorists to slow down near schools.
School buses at Ecolint, the popular name for the campuses of the International School of Geneva, will start the year Thursday 1 September with a difference: the school has been working with EPFL in Lausanne to come up with the most efficient, environmentally-friendly system for its fleet of school buses in the two cantons.
“Our student population is increasing rapidly,” said Michel Chinal, responsible for the project shortly before his retirement in June. He noted that the rising number of parents picking up and dropping off their children is creating traffic problems in the village of Founex, just outside Geneva. The bus service offered by the school is too slow. The Founex campus, La Chataigneraie, will be adding nearly 300 students with its new primary school opening this week.
“Parents often say that they would like to sign their children up, but the bus ride is too long,” according to Chinal. The school transports nearly 300 students in an area bounded by Morges in Vaud, neighbouring France and Geneva.
The solution was to work with mathematicians in EPFL’s Discrete Optimization Group.
EPFL chemist Rainer Beck, whose child attends the school, offered to optimize the service and he asked his mathematical colleague Friedrich Eisenbrand to tackle the problem.
Eisenbrand notes that “coming up with a simple arithmetic algorithm is not difficult. But that’s not an efficient approach; due to the enormous number of possible itineraries, the calculations are painfully slow. We needed to develop an algorithm that quickly rejected most routes, so that the computation could be completed before the end of the Universe.”
Risenbrand and PhD student Adrian Bock came up with a solution for this complex problem. Using a few clever techniques, says EPFL, the calculations only take half a day to complete.
Chateau de Coppet, home to the International Menuhin Music Academy (source: IMMA)
GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – The International Menuhim Music Academy (IMMA), newly based in Coppet, Tuesday 23 August named Maestro Maxim Vengerov, “the greatest violinist of his generation”, its new music counselor.
The IMMA was founded 30 years ago in Gstaad by Yehudi Menuhin, widely considered the finest violinist of the 20th century. It has 16 students from throughout the world and its mission is to offer a three-year scholarship every year to a number of violin and other string instrument virtuosos the opportunity to perfect their education by working with maestros and professors.
Gstaad remains the centre for IMMA’s week-long “Rencontres Musicales” every summer, where students and teachers work and offer performances that are open to the public.
The students, who are selected based only on talent, follow individualized programmes, including master classes at the IMMA. Their academic musical studies are designed to lead to a Master of Advanced Studies, MAS, and the academy is currently working towards its programme being recognized by the HES SO and expects to offer the MAS by 2012.
Students have a second part to their education, public concerts, as part of the newly renamed Menuhin Academy Soloists chamber orchestra.
Tuition is free for the students, who live with families in the area (see Editor’s Notepad: appeal to local families).
LAUSANNE, SWITZERLAND – The Swiss safety council, BPA, is putting up 1,400 posters around the country and police are increasing their presence near schools and crosswalks to remind drivers to stop for children on foot and on bicycles.
School starts Monday 22 September in canton Vaud and in most of Valais, with Geneva starting a week later, 29 August. Children headed back to school 15 August in the Goms Valley in Valais.
The number of serious accidents involving children 5-14 while between school and home was down in 2010, but with 180 critically injured or killed on Swiss roads last year, police are reminding drivers of their obligation to stop at a crosswalk if a pedestrian (including cyclists) is present.
Police in Vaud will be using mobile radars near schools for two weeks to remind drivers to slow down and to raise their awareness of the speed at which they are driving. They will also be handing out windshield cleaning cloths as a reminder to make sure your visibility is good.
They’ll be starting their 2011 visits to school classes to educate children about road safety. Police in Vaud made 1,348 visits to classrooms during the last school year.
Safety campaign poster for the 2011-12 school year: "Thank you for stopping for me" / Always come to a full stop
The TCS (Touring Club Suisse) offers a pointer to drivers: don’t use your hand or headlights to wave a child into an intersection because they’re more likely to run into the road without first checking traffic from both directions.
A final but critical reminder to drivers, say police, is to make sure all children under 12 or 1.5 metres in height are in child safety seats.
Children riding in a car without a seatbelt attached are three times as likely to be injured and 30 times as likely to be killed, according to Swiss statistics.
A 50kph crash, with no seatbelt, is the equivalent of a fall from the third storey of a building.
EPFL in Lausanne: foreigners pay just a bit more than Swiss students in fees
BERN, SWITZERLAND – Swiss universities have the legal right to limit the number of foreign students in specific disciplines and they may charge higher fees than those for Swiss students, to reflect the real cost of providing the education.
A report to this effect was delivered to the Swiss Universities Rectors Conference (Crus) earlier in the year, Matthias Stauffacher, the group’s director general, confirmed Tuesday 2 August.
Swiss university students pay annual fees that are well below the cost of their education, between CHF500 and 1,300 a semester for basic fees for undergraduate students. St Gallen, which is the only Swiss university that currently has a quota for foreign students, 25 percent (it offers several programmes in English), charges foreign students less than CHF300 a year extra for foreign students.
Crus brochure, “Studying in Switzerland, Universities 2011″
Will also create more secondary school places
ISLL, new international school, opens in Morges, September 2011
GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – Two schools, one new and one expanding, will significantly ease the pressure on the local English language and bilingual primary school offer starting in September. The continually growing international population in the Lake Geneva region has resulted in a worsening of what was already a shortage of places in schools where English is one of the teaching languages.
Morges school finds a home, thanks to regional development agency and town of Morges
The LLIS (Lake Leman International School) opens at La Gottaz in Morges 12 September, with kindergarten starting at age 3 to grade 5 (ages 9-11) opening during the first year, as well as a multi-lingual crèche or daycare centre for children from age 3 months. The school is planning to open a secondary school for the 2012-2013 academic year, with International Baccalaureate (IB) preparation.
It can take several years for a school to receive IB accreditation, but the new school, opening in its first year with seven classes, is basing its education programme on the IB, particularly for language learning, it says.
Finding a location for the school, especially given high rents in the Lake Geneva region, was not easy, but the Vaud Economic Development Agency and the town of Morges worked with the school, which is in a commercial complex next to the BAM regional train line and the A1 autoroute exit for Morges Ouest.
Anna Kaeser, who has several years experience in education in the UK and Switzerland, is the director of the school and a group of investors is working with management to ensure the financial viability of the school.
International schools also attract local Swiss famililes in part because they often offer a full-day programme, unlike Swiss state schools. The new LLIS will be open from 08:00 to 17:00, including the lunch hour, with a lunch service. The Cap Canaille crèche is located in the same building and is open from 06:30 to 18:30, five days a week, year round.
La Chataigneraie, part of the Int’l School of Geneva, adds 500 new students this September
New primary school at La Chataignerai, Founex
The oldest international schools in the world and a founding school of the IB programme, the International School of Geneva, has had waiting lists for several years.
This September it increases its intake dramatically at La Chataigneraie, its canton Vaud campus in Founex, thanks to a major construction programme. The school, with four campuses, had more than 4,000 students in September 2010.
Atrium in the centre of the new primary school creates light and airy space
The La Chataigneraie campus has built a new primary school that will house 642 students, and it added another storey to the old primary school, which is being turned over to the secondary school. Seven new classes are currently planned in the primary school and three in the secondary school, “but more classes may be added in the primary school if demand warrants it,” Catherine Merigay of the development office told GenevaLunch.
Total additional capacity is 500 students, potentially bringing the campus’s population to about 1,700 students.
La Chat, as it is popularly known, has been able to get rid of a number of portacabins and it is offering a “reception”, or kindergarten class for the first time, for children age 4 and up, starting in September.
Portacabins are disappearing thanks to an additional storey on La Chat's old primary school, now handed over to the secondary school
LAUSANNE, SWITZERLAND – EPFL chose the right week to talk about a new field project, part of a larger study of how environment influences flood rates in mountain valleys.
Ticino and parts of Valais, including Zermatt, are worriedly watching rising waters from heavy summer storms.
The two-year-old project to better understand the hydrology of the Alps in order to reduce risks is run by EPFL’s Environmental Fluid Mechanics Laboratory (Eflum). It has set up 25 ground weather stations in a 20 km2 area that covers a large part of the Val Ferret watershed. The goal is to improve methods for predicting natural disasters to better warn populations in risk zones. “Mathematical models exist, but they still don’t take into account all the data that are needed to establish reliable predictions, such as the influence of air temperature, the formation of thermal winds or the impact of precipitation,” says Marc Parlange, the EPFL professor who heads the lab.
The field project this summer has involved setting up several new tools: two weather stations on 10m towers, a weather balloon that will be regularly deployed, and three Lidars, laser-based instruments which will be used to take continuous wind data over a height of nearly 2 km.
Water and wind input are two key aspects being studied this summer. Val Ferrat was chosen because it was the rare valley to meet a specific set of requirements, says Raphaël Mutzner, the PhD student responsible for hydrologic modeling.
There were not many options, he points out.
BERN, SWITZERLAND – Energy research has been selected as the topic for the 2011-12 Swiss National Research Programme (NRP), overseen by the State Secretariat for Education and Research (SSER). The call for papers opened 8 July, with a deadline of 21 September for applications.
One to three new NRPs are selected for funding after proposals are reviewed, and the Swiss National Science Foundation is then responsible for implementing them.
The SSER says the NRPs “are the Swiss government’s research promotion tool intended to support research projects dealing with contemporary issues of national importance and which have the potential to make a scientifically sound and innovative contribution within a practical period of time to a solution to urgent societal or economic problems.”
GENEVA, SWITZERLAND = The Swiss Network for International Studies has awarded funds to eight major university projects out of 18 applications in its annual call for proposals in the field of pluri-disciplinary international studies.
The awards are given for up to two years, with a CHF300,000 ceiling. They are awarded to projects that are based at a Swiss university.
Five projects are going ahead; three have been conditionally approved, with the final decision to be made after modifications are presented. The five that are now funded:
- Large-scale land acquisitions in Southeast Asia: Rural transformations between global agendas and peoples’ right to food
- A multi-scale approach to land governance in complex cultural, environmental and institutional contexts. Development of a comparative GIS methodology linking land use, land cover and land tenure from the cases of Bolivia and the Lao PDR
- Mobile Access to Knowledge: Culture and Safety in Africa. Documenting and assessing the impact of cultural events and public art on urban safety
- Mountlennium: Reaching Millennium Development Goals through Regional Mountain Governance
- Individual Preferences for International Environmental Cooperation
BERN, SWITZERLAND – Switzerland’s switch to the Bologna system of academic titles has shown its worth, Bern says. A study carried out to examine the use of the Bachelors and Masters degrees but also the continuing use in parallel of some Swiss diplomas, notably in engineering, has shown that the Bologna system provides clear indications of where and what studies the student has completed.
The government notes, in a statement issued 4 July, that the Swiss diploma titles will gradually be phased out, however.
BERN, SWITZERLAND – The Swiss federal government reorganized several departments Wednesday 29 June, notably pulling together under the roof of the Department of the Economy the country’s polytechnic and research institutes, and ongoing professional training and technology programmes.
The move underscores the growing importance Switzerland is giving to technology and innovation by creating a common arena to improve education and research ties in these areas. “The Federal Council has taken notice that training highly qualified people, and research and innovation are important assets for Switzerland in terms of attractiveness, competitivity and growth.
The cantons will have closer ties under the new system to the federal polytechnics in Lausanne (EFPL) and Zurich (ETH), universities and specialized graduate schools.
The change takes effect 1 January 2013 but the run-up period and early months of the new system could spark a tough political fight over budgets, with two strong personalities heading the current research, and training and technology programmes, reports Le Temps (Fr).
Lake Geneva: more going on under the surface than we know
LAUSANNE, SWITZERLAND – Elemo, short for Exploration des eaux lémaniques (exploring Lake Geneva’s waters) got underway Tuesday, with Russian Mir submersibles heading 200 metres down into the canyons and cliffs of Lake Geneva. The project is based at the EPFL, the federal polytechnic in Lausanne.
One of Elemo’s first tests will help researchers to understand how the cliffs, which are essentially unstable heaps of sediment as high as 50 metres at a depth of as much as 200 metres, were formed by the Rhone, through sampling and then dating the sediment. A second will measure the amount of methane released from the deep canyons as organic matter decomposes.
Methane is a greenhouse gas.
Stephanie Girardclos, from the University of Geneva, heads the project with these two studies, for which four researchers going on the dives will be gathering data this week.
Elemo includes 15 other projects, mostly environmental, with researchers looking at micropollutants, biology, geology and the physics of currents. A succession of teams will work throughout the summer on various dive sites, says the EPFL.
Flavio Anselmetti, a researcher for the Swiss aquatic research institute Eawag, who is part of the Elemo team, says new data could help us better understand the lake, including historical events. “A collapse of the canyon could be what caused the tsunami that swept across the lake and destroyed the bridges in Geneva in 563,” he says. “These are extremely rare events, but it’s important to assess the risk.”
The canyons are formed as the Rhone pours into it: the river is colder and sediment-rich from glacier-fed streams and rivers in canton Valais and eastern Vaud. It continues to flow through the lake. “It really is a river at the bottom of the lake, carving out valleys as it meanders along,” says Anselmetti.
The lake remains a mystery in many ways, surprising considering that half of the drinking water for the population of 1.5 million in the region comes from the lake.
Eawag is responsible for four of the projects.
International scientists have access to the submersibles for research purposes thanks to support from Ferring Pharmaceuticals in Saint Prex, canton Vaud, the Russian Federation’s Honorary Consulate in Lausanne and the EPFL. Ferring is financing most of the project and the company’s chairman, Frederik Paulsen, was at the site of the first dives Tuesday. He was joined by Don Walsh, an American oceanographer who was with Jacques Piccard during their famous descent into the Mariana Trench 23 January 1960, the deepest point of the world’s ocean, in the bathyscaphe Trieste. It went down to a record maximum of 10,911 metres.
Background story, GenevaLunch, 1 March 2011
End of school year party in Geneva ends tragically
GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – Geneva is the only canton where children up to age 12 don’t attend school on Wednesday morning, but this is likely to change in 2013.
The cantonal government Thursday evening 26 May voted 56 to 22, with 4 abstaining, in favour of having school Wednesday morning, in part to bring the canton in line with the rest of French-speaking Switzerland.
A key argument for the change has also been Geneva’s relatively weak performance in the Pisa European education studies, compared to other parts of Switzerland.
The teachers’ union is not in favour of the change and has announced that it is beginning the process for a popular referendum to take the issue to the population.
The debate over school on Wednesday has coloured Geneva politics for several years, with teachers and some parent groups arguing that children need a break in the middle of the week.
One rider's bike, from the 15% who cycle to EPFL
LAUSANNE, SWITZERLAND – EPFL, the federal polytechnic institute in Lausanne, is pushing bicycles and will continue to do so until the end of June, in every sense, with its Bike to Work 2011 programme, which kicks off 23 May.
The school wants “to reduce by 10 percent by 2014 the 30 tons of CO₂ emitted daily by commuting vehicles on normal working days” and its previous Bike to Work programmes have made a good start: 15 percent of commutes are currently done on bikes, compared to 11 percent five years ago.
EFPL is registering Bike to Work riding teams until 31 May and will be giving out an electric bike to a winning team. The goal of this year’s programme is to get people used to riding bicycles for work. “To take part, you have to form teams of four people who are prepared to make 50 percent of their journeys to EPFL or to return home by bicycle, during the month of June”, the call for teams says.
The project is part of the larger Swiss Bike to Work programme, where companies register teams by 31 May, and the teams then ride at least part of the way to and from work 1-30 June, preferably combining this with public transport for the non-cycling part of the trip. The national programme has several prizes that include a weekend for two in Hamburg, to bicycles and bike accessories. Details
Zurich, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) - Questions about the length of the Swiss-Italian border and the density of the population of Switzerland have helped a group of researchers at ETH in Zurich show that the “wisdom of the crowd” theory has its limitations, and that when we are influenced by information from a social crowd, we get dumber, as a group. The article appeared 16 May in the influential PNAS, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science in the US.
Source: Proceedings of the National Academy of Science of the USA
Wisdom of the crowd theory, first developed in 1907 by F Galton, was supported by research in 2004 by J Surowiecki using examples from stock markets, political elections, and quiz shows. The idea has been used to support blogs, the voice of many, versus major media and to some extent to support social networks as information sources.
The wisdom of the crowd theory argues that the median estimate of a group can be more accurate than estimates of experts.
“In contrast, we demonstrate by experimental evidence (number = 144) that even mild social influence can undermine the
wisdom of crowd effect in simple estimation tasks,” say the authors. The impact can range from small, local groups embracing mis-information to much more widespread lose of “wisdom”, for example in the recent global economic crisis, the Zurich group argues.
The work of Jan Lorenza, Heiko Rauhutb, and Frank Schweitzera, chair of systems design at Zurich’s federal polytechnic institute, ETH, and Dirk Helbing, ETH chair of sociology, was published online before the print version, in PNAS.
“Although groups are initially ‘wise,’ knowledge about estimates of others narrows the diversity of opinions to such an extent that it undermines the wisdom of crowd effect in three different ways.
- The ‘social influence effect’ diminishes the diversity of the crowd without improvements of its collective error.
- The ‘range reduction effect’ moves the position of the truth to peripheral regions of the range of estimates so that the crowd becomes less reliable in providing expertise for external observers.
- The ‘confidence effect’ boosts individuals’ confidence after convergence of their estimates despite lack of improved accuracy. Examples of the revealed mechanism range from misled elites to the recent global financial crisis.
Studies in social psychology have shown “that humans have an inclination to adjust their opinions to those of others so
that they gradually converge toward consensus”, the researchers note, but they point out two drawbacks to many of the studies: questions do not have well-defined correct answers (opinions on abortion or election polls, for example) and there is no monetary reward, meaning that “conformity is costless” and correctness becomes less important.
An example of the failure of the first: “‘cultural’ markets of musical tastes, in which it has been demonstrated that almost any song of average quality may become a hit if social influence is introduced by publishing the number of downloads (19). In this case, the popularity of a song and its perceived quality emerge through the process of interactive downloading and rating. The herding effects created in this way prevent an objective measurement of quality.”
The research used 144 ETH students, working in 12 sessions with 12 students each. Participants had to solve six different estimation tasks testing their real-world knowledge regarding geographical facts and crime statistics. “We selected questions for which subjects
were unlikely to know the exact answer but also avoided those for which they did not have a clue at all.”
Full research report, PNAS (pdf)
EPFL to give away 2,500 tiny robots Saturday
iCub, an EPFL robot (photo, ©2011 iCub / EPFL)
(video at end) Lausanne, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – Why we are altruistic, sacrificing individual gains for the greater good of a group, has just become a little clearer, thanks to hundreds of generations of robots in Lausanne. Researchers in engineering and robotics at EPFL in Lausanne and in biology at the University of Lausanne 3 May reported their findings into the genetics of altruism, a project that involved using robots to more quickly see how altruism develops over generations.
Robotics Festival brings cutting edge robots to public
The latest robot success in Lausanne could increase the size of the crowds expected at EPFL Saturday 9 May when EPFL hosts its fourth annual Robotics Festival: 30 stands with robots, 21 workshops where you can make your own, a robot contest and 2,500 little Superpattt’s being given away are part of the attraction, with expected 10-15,000 people expected to take part (register now to get your Superpattt – in French).
The altruistic robots work was carried out by EPFL robotics professor Dario Floreano and University of Lausanne biologist Laurent Keller.
“Testing the evolution of altruism using quantitative studies in live organisms has been largely impossible because experiments need to span hundreds of generations and there are too many variables,” EPFL notes in a press release. “However, Floreano’s robots evolve rapidly using simulated gene and genome functions and allow scientists to measure the costs and benefits associated with the trait.”
Their paper was published in the journal Public Library of Science (PLoS) Biology. It provides support for what is known as Hamilton’s rule of kin selection, developed in 1964 by WD Hamilton. He proposed a precise set of conditions under which altruistic behavior may evolve. EPFL describes it:
“If an individual family member shares food with the rest of the family, it reduces his or her personal likelihood of survival but increases the chances of family members passing on their genes, many of which are common to the entire family. Hamilton’s rule simply states that whether or not an organism shares its food with another depends on its genetic closeness (how many genes it shares) with the other organism.
‘We have shown that Hamilton’s kin selection theory always accurately predicts the relationship between the evolution of altruism and the relatedness of individuals in a species,’ explains Markus Waibel, lead author of the paper and former doctoral student of both Keller and Floreano.
Hamilton’s rule has long been a subject of much debate because its equation seems too simple to be true. ‘This study mirrors Hamilton’s rule remarkably well to ex-plain when an altruistic gene is passed on from one generation to the next, and when it is not,’ says Keller.”
The study will help biologists but it has already had an impact on other robots at EPFL, notably swarms of flying robots. “We have been able to take this experiment and extract an algorithm that we can use to evolve cooperation in any type of robot,” says Floreano. “We are using this altruism algorithm to improve the control system of our flying robots and we see that it allows them to effectively collaborate and fly in swarm formation more successfully.”
How robots become altruistic after 500 generations
Henry Markram, Human Brain project
Adrian Ionescu, EPFL, Guardian Angels project
Lausanne, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – EPFL-led projects are two of the six accepted in the finals of a major research initiative by the European Commission, its FET (future technologies) flagship projects. At least two of the finalists will be funded by the EC to the tune of up to CHF1 billion over 10 years, with the decision about the winners to be announced in 2012.
The final project will make FET one of the largest research initiatives in the world, notes EPFL.
The two Lausanne-led international projects, both of which have already received EC funding to permit them to develop their proposals to date, are the Human Brain project and Guardian Angels.
Each will receive about €1.5 million to refine their proposals in the coming year.
The finalists were announced Wednesday 4 May in Budapest, Hungary, at a FET conference.
The other four finalists, listed by eGov Monitor, are:
- FuturICT Knowledge Accelerator and Crisis-Relief System: ICT can analyse vast amounts of data and complex situations so as to better predict natural disasters, or manage and respond to man-made disasters that cross national borders or continents.
- Graphene Science and technology for ICT and beyond: Graphene is a new substance developed by atomic and molecular scale manipulation that could replace silicon as the wonder material of the 21st century.
- IT Future of Medicine: digital technology has the power to deliver individualised medicine, based on molecular, physiological and anatomical data collected from individual patients and processed on the basis of globally integrated medical knowledge.
- Robot Companions for Citizens: soft skinned and intelligent robots have highly developed perceptive, cognitive and emotional skills, and can help people, radically changing the way humans interact with machines.
The first is the outgrowth of an earlier EPFL project led by Henry Markram, the Blue Brain project, now being developed by an international consortium. Human Brain integrates “everything we know about the brain into computer models and [uses] these models to simulate the actual working of the brain.
Ultimately, it will attempt to simulate the complete human brain,” according to the project’s web site.
Christofer Hierold, ETHZ, Guardian Angels project
GuardianAngels, under the direction of EPFL’s Adrian Ionescu and Christofer Hierold from ETHZ in Zurich is a zero-power project that “takes advantage of these recent developments in low-power electronics, energy harvesting and micro and nano-sensors to propose a new vision of the future: next-generation technology contributing to our wellbeing and our safety with simple, discrete and affordable high-tech accessories that seamlessly integrate into our daily life,” its web site notes.
Background, Human Brain project, GenevaLunch
by Jenny Turin, second year apprentice
by hird year student Naomi Guillaume
Lausanne, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – A high spot in the world of Swiss chocolate is the annual awards ceremony for the next generation of chocolatiers-confisseurs in canton Vaud, designed to promote the three=year apprenticeship programme.
The prize-giving ceremony Tuesday 3 May at the Lausanne-Crissier shopping centre awarded top prizes to three students from each year of the canton’s programme.
The award-winning confections will be on display for the pubic until 14 may, at the Léman centre in Crissier.
The theme of this year’s contest was haute couture, and part of the ceremony was a fashion show with four dresses made from chocolate, including one worn by Miss Suisse Romande, who wore white chocolate.
Click on images to view larger
First year
Damien Sauvageat, confiserie Zurcher, Montreux
Lydia Felder, confiserie Fornerod, Morges
Charlotte Guidi, confiserie Poyet, Vevey
Second year
Jenny Turin, confiserie Hedinger, Aigle
Victor Herbillon, confiserie Moret, Lausanne
Elsa Stegmüller, confiserie Rapp, Prangins
Third year
Aurélia Zahnd, confiserie Manuel, Crissier
Elodie Manesse, confiserie Boillat, St-Prex
Naomi Guillaume, confiserie Zurcher, Montreux
Editor’s note: Tim Rylands was one of the trainers at the Pollens Pédagogique in Geneva last Friday, 8 April, a large-scale teachers’ continuing education day. Here is his firsthand report, republished from his blog, with permission. Note that his original post carries a much larger number of photos.
By Tim Rylands
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – Wow! What an event. Over 1,400 hundred teachers, from 44 schools, at 5 different venues across Geneva! Speakers from across the globe. “Togetherness is a strength”, said one of the organisers, at last night’s opening dinner for the presenters. A grand day out for schools across the city, and done in great style.
The title is Pollens pédagogiques, with the concept of spreading teaching ideas, like pollen, and cultivating flowering ways of helping children grow. (Ooo Mr Rylands, you’re getting all metaphorically poetical). The seminars are taking place in both French and English, but my French hasn’t seen the light of day for many years, so is far from blossoming!
Today, we were presenting a couple of sessions at Ecole Internationale La Grande Boissière, and we are looking forward to when we return, for three days in May, to work with students, and teachers, on extensions of elements we covered so far.
Congratulations, and thank you, to Jean-Claude Brès, from L’Institut de Formation Pédagogique, Marcia Banks, Vice Principal, Ecole Internationale La Grande Boissière, (International School of Geneva) Primary School, La Grande Boissière Campus, for organising our trip to Geneva for this huge event.
It is always a shame, when you realise that there are some superb people booked to speak at the same event as you, and you can’t nip out and see their sessions. It is great, though, to get to know each other a little before the actual day of the conferences and workshops . . . to discover new acquaintances.
And what better way than to do so in the setting of a school with the same name . . . L’Ecole la Découverte, who welcomed us to their school yesterday evening. Just a sweet irony that we couldn’t find “the school of discovery” at first. When we did, they had cooked up an excellent Thai feast, in one of the school halls. Thanks all.
John Ratey (John Ratey.com) of SparkingLife.org, gave an excellent keynote on the power of excercise on the brain and learning.
John talked about the ever increasing sedentary lifestyle, where children are not moving as much as they used to, partly due to parental fears of letting their children, travel and play independently.
