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.
$10 million to be sought to finance the project
Rolex Learning Center, EPFL in Lausanne (photo©, Peter Brodbeck)
Lausanne, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – EPFL in Lauanne and the Hebrew University in Israel signed an agreement 28 March to form a new partnership in brain research. Finalizing the agreement was part of the visit of Israel’s President, Shimon Peres, to Switzerland.
The two have agreed to raise $10 million together for the first five years of operations, for joint laboratories, research projects and fellowships for graduate students.
The partnership is expected to focus on “brain mechanisms controlling behavior and cognition and to study effective methods for treatment of neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson’s Alzheimer’s and autism”, according to a statement issued in Israel.
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – One hundred students from 11 to 14 are learning how to save a heart today, thanks to a course organized by the International School of Geneva and the Swiss Heart Foundation.
They’ll be working with Mini-Anne, a new lifesaving measures self-teaching doll.
The students are given a hands-on course in the lifesaving measures needed when confronted by someone suffering from heart or circulatory failure.
The course was organized after the school’s application was accepted for Project Help, a cantonal project to educate and involve young people in lifesaving programmes.
Some 8,000 people die every year of heart failure, in Switzerland.
Only 5 percent of those live if the problem occurs outside a hospital setting. Only 1-2 percent of the population knows what steps to take to help the victim.
Earth's airglow, viewed from space by the tiny SwissCube satellite
Lausanne, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – They won’t be competing with Nasa photography from space, but this doesn’t diminish the thrill for students at EPFL, the federal polytechnic institute in Lausanne, on seeing their first photo from space.
Students spent six years designing and building the tiny SwissCube satellite, which was launched 23 September 2009. It weighs only 854 grams and is 10cm3 in size.
It is designed to allow staff and students to study airglow, described by the university as ” a luminescent phenomenon in the planetary atmosphere caused by cosmic rays striking the upper atmosphere and chemiluminescence caused mainly by oxygen and nitrogen reacting with hydroxyl ions at heights of a few hundred kilometers.”
Video by the European Space Agency, 2007, on the project and the students’ work in the early stages
Video interview with Muriel Noca, 2011, on SwissCube’s findings
Max, the world's longest tracked bird in the wild, up to her usual Spring business
Fribourg, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – Max is at it again: the Swiss white stork has been coupling madly this at her decade-old nesting site on the Swiss-German border.
And, as she has taken to doing for the past couple years, she’s first been coupling noisily with a new fellow in town, from 20 February to 8 March and then, when her old mate of the past few seasons arrived, she shifted back to him.
The new fellow appeared at first to have successfully kicked out the old mate from the nest, but the morning of 9 March Max and her mate of five years were busy together in the nest. Stay tuned for further nesting episodes.
Max is a migratory bird who has been tracked for nearly 12 years, longer than any other banded bird in the wild.
Mating in Switzerland in spring: bees do it, birds do it, Max the stork definitely does it
Spring and migratory birds and mating in Switzerland are an annual mix, and probably few other birds are watched as actively as Max, who was given a band 11 years ago and has since been followed closely by the History of Natural Science in Fribourg.
She spends her summers in Germany, just over the border from the country where she was born, Switzerland, then she heads south every winter to bask in the warmer weather of southern Spain or, occasionally, Morocco.
Lausanne, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – (video) The Blue Brain project at EPFL has refuted the centuries-old belief that the human brain may start life as a blank slate, enriched and developed through experience alone, findings which are potentially of great significance for treatment of neurological disorders. The findings appear to be “common across animals”, says the research team.
EPFL’s researchers have demonstrated that “small clusters of pyramidal neurons in the neocortex interconnect according to a set of immutable and relatively simple rules”, the university says in a press release. In other words, the clusters are basic building blocks that contain within them “a kind of fundamental, innate knowledge”.
Experience builds on these clusters, each of which contains about 50 neurons.
The findings were published ahead of the print edition 7 March in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Science. The authors, under the lead of Blue Brain project head Henry Markram, write in their abstract:
“Neuronal circuitry is often considered a clean slate that can be dynamically and arbitrarily molded by experience. However, when we investigated synaptic connectivity in groups of pyramidal neurons in the neocortex, we found that both connectivity and synaptic weights were surprisingly predictable. . .
“We speculate that these elementary neuronal groups are prescribed Lego-like building blocks of perception and that acquired memory relies more on combining these elementary assemblies into higher-order constructs.”
The EPFL argues that “the discovery redistributes the balance between innate and acquired”, a considerable advance in our understanding of how the brain works:
Read more…
Mir submersibles, made in Russia, have been used for numerous scientific missions in the Arctic and Lake Baikal. They were also used to film the hulk of the Titanic for James Cameron's film about the sinking of the ship. They will be used in Lake Geneva to help scientists better understand western Europe's largest lake (source: EPFL).
Geneva and Lausanne, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – Russian Mir submersibles will soon populate the depths of Lake Geneva, the EPFL, the Swiss federal polytechnic institute in Lausanne announced Tuesday 1 March. Fifteen teams from five countries will carry out field research using the submersibles, from June 2011 to August, in a project dubbed elemo.
Geology, biology (especially micro-pollutants and bacteriology) and physics projects will be undertaken to better understand how human activity affects the lake.
The submersibles will operate in three main areas:
- Vidy, near Lausanne, a heavily-populated area where the impact of micro-pollutants can be studied
- mid-lake directly offshore from Lausanne, going as deep as 309 metres, a depth at which little is known about the lake
- Villeneuve, where glacial deposits and sediment have created 30-metre high canyons in the lake: a spectacular, unstable part of the lake that begs exploration.
Lake Geneva, looking from Saint Prex to Lausanne: windy on the surface and largely unknown at its depths (click on image to view larger)
International scientists will 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.
“One-and-a-half million people live near Lake Geneva. Fifty percent of this population gets its daily drinking water from the lake. Yet there is still much to learn about the complex workings of this heavily human-impacted ecosystem,” the EPFL notes in its press release.
“The researchers will gain easy access to the deepest parts of the lake, at depths of over 300 meters, where they will be able to study how pollutants accumulate, and even perform field experiments. The lake consists of layers of water that are permeable to differing degrees. By using the submersibles to carry out a detailed study of the boundaries between these layers, the researchers will be able to better understand how the water circulates. Over time, these models will be of the utmost importance for measuring the local and overall impact of human activity on Lake Geneva.”
The 15 teams include scientists from several institutions: the EPFL, the Universities of Geneva, Neuchatel, Haute-Savoie and Newcastle, Eawag (the Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and
Technology), Inra (the National Agronomic Research Institute) in Toulouse, the CNRS (French National Centre for Research), the Russian Academy of Sciences, and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute.
Anatoly Sagalevitch, a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences and the expedition leader for many missions on board the Mir submersibles, notably in the Arctic and Lake Baikal, will join the project for the summer of 2011, with his team.
The 18.6 tons deep-diving vehicles are 7.8 metres long and 3.6m wide. They can reach depths of over 6,000 metres and move at a speed of 9 kph horizontally, 40 kph vertically.
Canton Valais, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – A secondary teacher who was dismissed in October 2010 after a dispute with the Stalden school authorities over a crucifix, will remain suspended, according to a Valais cantonal tribunal judgement issued 28 January. It did not return a verdict on the dismissal itself.
Valentin Abgottspon removed a crucifix from a classroom and refused to put it back when ordered to do so by school authorities. The man cited a Federal Court decision in defense of his right not to have crucifixes in rooms in which he teaches.
The Swiss Bishops Conference sees the case differently, saying in a statement that it considers removing the crucifix a measure of “intolerance incompatible with the freedom of religion and conscience.”
The teacher dismissed in Valais, who is also president of the cantonal section of the Freethinkers Association of Switzerland, which advocates for secularism and the separation of church and state, is seeking employment.
Over 500 people have joined in a Facebook campaign of “solidarity” with Abgottson.
Links to other sites: Le Nouvelliste (Fr), Swissinfo
Major building projects: cutting-edge neuroprostheses centre gets new home
Proposed EPFL hall, architect Perrault
Lausanne, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) - EPFL, one of Switzerland’s two federal polytechnic institutes, is embarking on a new construction programme that will bring some of its older buildings into line with the new Rolex Learning Center.
The rationale behind the building work, which goes well beyond renovations, is to regroup part of the central services of the school and to create a number of new laboratories for engineering students.
“The work is a follow-up—to a certain extent—to the building of the Rolex Learning Center, since the content of the central library has been moved to EPFL’s flagship building, freeing up significant space,” the school notes in a press release.
“The Center for Neuroprosthetics, which was started at the end of 2008, and is supported by several foundations will thus benefit from a dedicated and perfectly equipped location.”
The Bertarelli family and Borel family (Defitech) foundations are major donors.
Architect Dominique Perrault, who is French, will work with the Swiss Karl Steiner company, which was awarded the general contractor work. Perrault is currently redesigning the Locarno rail station in canton Ticino.
Exterior view, Perrault's hall at EPFL
He is known for his architectural work on the French National Library (the François Mitterand site) in Paris in, 1995, the Court of Justice of the European Union in Luxembourg, the Ewha Women’s University in Seoul, South Korea and the Fukoku Tower in Osaka, Japan.
“The winning project convinced us because it establishes a strong link between the older buildings on the campus and the new constructions on the south side of the campus”, says Francis-Luc Perret, EPFL vice-president who is responsible for real estate and who was president of the jury.
An MoS2 (molybdenite) crystal
(correction 31 January) Lausanne, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – EPFL researchers in Lausanne have shown that a material now used in lubricants could herald a long-awaited leap forward in the electronics industry, allowing smaller and more energy-efficient electronic chips: a material with “distinct advantages over traditional silicon or graphene”.
EPFL says molybdenite, also known as MoS2, could replace these two materials. It is the key to major energy savings, they note. If the electronics industry begins to move away from silicon the implications could be far-reaching.
China is a major supplier of silicon and fears that it might limit exports have become a hot international business and political topic.
Molybdenite on the other hand is “abundant in nature, is often used as an element in steel alloys or as an additive in lubricants”, say the researchers.
Transistor with MoS2
Molybdenite is widely used, but until now it has not been extensively studied for use in electronics.
“It’s a two-dimensional material, very thin and easy to use in nanotechnology. It has real potential in the fabrication of very small transistors, light-emitting diodes (Leds) and solar cells,” says EPFL professor Andras Kis, whose Lanes colleagues M Radisavljevic, A Radenovic and M Brivio worked on the study with him.
Their findings are published 30 January by EPFL’s Lanes (Laboratory of Nanoscale Electronics and Structures) team, in Nature Nanotechnology.
Kis compares its advantages with silicon, currently the primary component used in electronic and computer chips, and graphene, discovered in 2004 by two physicists at the University of Manchester, André Geim and Konstantin Novoselov, who were awarded the 2010 Nobel Prize in Physics.
The mix in Swiss forests will likely look different thanks to climate extremes
Lausanne, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) - Mathematicians at EPFL, the Lausanne-based Polytechnic Institute, are giving forest guardians a helping hand in better understanding what is happening to the tree population.
Half of the Scots pines in the Viège/Visp forest in canton Valais, for example, have died in the past 20 years, and mathematical models have made it clear that the culprit is not so much higher temperatures, as climate extremes. “It’s now acknowledged that it’s extreme climate situations that actually modify vegetation,” EPFL notes in a press release.
The university’s chair of statistics at EPFL, Jacques Ferrez, who is also with the Swiss Federal Research Institute, will soon publish a study of 14 forests, with 10 years of data.
“During the last 10 years, thermometers have been placed simultaneously in the forest and on the outside. We select the extreme daily temperatures, and among this data we only track unusual events.,” explains Ferrez. “You could say that we go by the maximums of maximums and the minimums of minimums.”
Swiss can say bye-bye Scots pines, hello palm trees
Reading results, especially for non-Swiss students, improve sharply since
The start of a Pisa study mathematics question for 15-year-olds
Bern, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – Swiss students age 15 are among the world’s elite when it comes to mathematics, the latest Pisa study by the OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) shows. The average score of 534 is well above those of European countries, and 24 percent of Swiss students achieved the top two marks, 5 and 6, compared to the OECD average of 13 percent.
At the other end of the scale, only 14 percent of Swiss students are considered weak in mathematics, having failed to achieve level 2, compared to an OECD average of 22 percent. The world’s best mathematics students: Shanghai-China (600), Singapore (562), Hong Kong-China (555), Korea (546), Chinese Taipai (543). The first non-Asian country for mathematics is Finland, followed closely by Liechtenstein and Switzerland.
Clear overall rankings are not part of the Pisa results: OECD countries are ranked, but not “partner economies” such as Shanghai-China region, which had the highest scores in all three areas. Remarkably, 14.6 percent of students in Shanghai-China and 12.3 percent of students in Singapore attained the highest levels of proficiency in all three subjects, compared to only 4.1 percent of the total group tested. The Pisa study also asssesses educational equity, the size of the gaps between best- and worst-performing students, and gender differences.
The Pisa (Programme international pour le suivi des acquis des élèves) research has been carried out every three years since 2000 by the OECD. The goal is to measure how well students are equipped for the future. Students are tested in mathematics, science and reading each time, but one of the three is selected each year for in-depth testing and research. The 2009 theme was reading. Seventy-five countries and OECD “partner economies” took part in the 2009 Pisa research of which 34 are OECD member countries. The first study in 2000 had 31 participating countries/economies.
Overall mean scores put Switzerland in top 15 OECD countries
The mean scores provide an indication of where a country sits in international comparisons. The Pisa executive summary to the 2009 report, issued 7 December, notes for the overall results in mathematics, science and reading, the three areas where students are tested:
“Korea and Finland are the highest performing OECD countries, with mean scores of 539 and 536 points, respectively. However, the partner economy Shanghai-China outperforms them by a significant margin, with a mean score of 556. top-performing countries or economies in reading literacy include Hong Kong-China (with a mean score of 533), Singapore (526), Canada (524), New Zealand (521), Japan (520) and Australia (515). The Netherlands (508), Belgium (506), Norway (503), Estonia (501), Switzerland (501), Poland (500), Iceland (500) and Liechtenstein (499) also perform above the OECD mean score of 494, while the United States, Sweden, Germany, Ireland, France, Denmark, the United Kingdom, Hungary, Portugal, and partner economy Chinese Taipei have scores close to the OECD mean.
Reading results up strongly in Switzerland, better than neighbours’
Government education subsidies keep fees low, even for foreign students
Parked and working hard at the Rolex Learning Center, EPFL in Lausanne
Neuchatel, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – One-fifth of Swiss university students are foreign, with the figure climbing for graduate students, yet university fees remain low in Switzerland thanks to government subsidies. Parents pay about half of their adult children’s university costs. New federal statistics published Tuesday 23 November show that only 10 percent of the cost of attending graduate school is financed by scholarships or student loans.
The figures are part of a European-wide survey, Eurostudent, to be published in coming days, according to Bern. Thirty countries participated in the study.
Living at home saves students’ one-third of costs
Three-quarters of Swiss graduate school students work, and their families finance at least 50 percent of their costs.
The bulk of working students are employed during the school year as well as during school holidays.
Students at the HES, or specialized schools, are most often employed in a field linked to their studies.
Graduate students spend on average an additional CHF1,870 a month if they are paying rent away from their parents’ home, or CHF1,210 if they are living at home. Swiss graduate school tuition fees range from CHF1,000-8,000 a year, with foreign students often but not always paying the higher fees.
EPFL’s Aebischer: we need more foreign students
EPFL: Rolex Learning Center has cubicle's for teamwork
The relatively low fees, compared to those in the UK and US, for example, are due largely to government subsidies, but there is little outcry over subsidizing international students. A recent change in the law now gives international students six months to find a job before their permits run out at the end of their studies. Some students, notably engineers, are in short supply and companies who hire them are anxious to see schools like EPFL, the Lausanne polytechnic, turn out more of them.
“There’s a real penurie,” says Denis Piaget, chief executive officer of Etel, a company in Motier, canton Neuchatel. It is the world’s leading supplier of direct drive and motion systems, whose high-tech industry clients include makers of semi-conductors, and it has long worked closely with EPFL. “Our products are unique, so we’re constantly innovating, and our clients have to be companies that are able and ready to invest in that. It’s tough to find really well qualified engineers who can work at this level, so strong academic centres are crucial for us.”
IUCN, Gland, extension using new technologies for zero emissions concept (photo, Alain Bucher, Holcim)
Zurich, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – It’s time to shift from trying to simply save energy in our buildings to a “zero emission building” approach, the Zurich federal polytechnic institute, ETH, is arguing 19 November, presenting its concept to the public.
“People have been heating with the help of combustion processes ever since man discovered how to make fire, using wood and fossil fuels like coal or natural gas to keep their homes warm and snug. The CO2 problem and climate change, however, have put a major question mark over the method. The Department of Architecture at ETH Zurich is therefore urging a paradigm shift: not just away from combustion technologies and towards seasonal energy storage, but also from simple energy-saving towards zero emissions,” members of the department of architecture state in a press release.
One of its example of how this can work is the extension of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) building in Gland.
The zero emission concept suggests buildings that don’t need thick layers of insulation in the building shell unnecessary and that are thus free from standardized regulations.
Environmental research becomes more visible thanks to new database
Business and environmental education, non-voting “votes” for foreigners, teacher training in int’l education part of the action
Business and the environment: no longer unnatural bedfellows in Switzerland
Geneva and Bern, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) - Researchers worldwide will now be able to connect more easily with Swiss researchers in environmental studies thanks to a new database hosted by the Federal Office for the Environment. The database, officially online as of Monday 8 November, regroups more than 1,000 projects at 10 universities, the two EPFs (polytechnic institutes in Lausanne and Zurich), 7 specialized graduate schools and 30 private and public institutions involved in the field. The publicly available information can be searched by institution, canton or research area (or by key words) in English, French, German and Italian.
Geneva’s Graduate Institute opens new international environmental centre
One of the newcomers to the group is the Graduate Institute’s Centre for International Environmental Studies (CIES) in Geneva, launched 3 November with a packed house at the opening day lecture.
Mathematical invention part of the future shrinking of our electronic devices
EPFL infograph, Pascal Coderey, 2010
Lausanne, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – EPFL is boasting its 1,000th invention 3 November, with the official arrival of Kandou, a new system based on mathematics whose daunting task is to try to reduce the world’s computer electricity consumption, currently 150 billion kWh per year, which translates into a monthly bill of several billion dollars. The university is boldly predicting that Kandou “could equip most of our electronic systems within a few years.”
Kandou is the 1,000th invention to arrive in the university’s Service of Industrial Relations. It was invented by Harm Cronie and Amin Shokrollahi of the EPFL algorithm laboratory and in a nutshell “enables processors to communicate more rapidly—while using less energy—with their peripherals”: memory, printers, monitors, an EPFL press release notes. The system has already sparked strong interest from large companies in the computer field, it adds.
Most electronic appliances today use ultra-rapid processors that communicate with other processors or other peripherals by using electronic buses, a kind of information highways.
Left to right: William Chin, new EPFL/Harvard programme chair, Didier Burkhalter, Harvard, Ernesto Bertarelli, Bertarelli Foundation, Patrick Aebischer, EPFL
Lausanne, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) - The EPFL in Lausanne has been building a strong research base in bioengineering, including work in neuroengineering, but a grant announced Friday 29 October by the Bertarelli Foundation moves it a firm step closer to being a major international research centre in the area of engineered solutions to help people with neurological impairments.
The field covers a range of healthcare problems for people who have had neurological damage, from birth or from strokes, degenerative diseases and accidents.
The $9 million grant from the Bertarelli Foundation for a joint programme with Harvard in the US brings the two universities together to take neuroprosthetic devices developped at the EPFL to the testing stage at Harvard.
The Bertarelli Foundation in 2009 had already provided some of the initial funding to establish the EPFL’s Neuprosthetics Center, a joint project between the School of Life Sciences and the School of Engineering, where it is housed.
José del R Millán of the centre describes neuroprosthetics as “a rapidly growing discipline that brings together neuroscience and biomedical engineering and seeks to interface the neural system directly to prostheses”.
The centre works with university hospitals in Geneva and Lausanne and with biomedical companies in the Lake Geneva region, but a logical extension of its creation last year is a partnerships to coordinate development work with clinical trials.
Daniel Loss, U of Basel, winner of the prestigious Marcel Benoist science prize 2010
Basel, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – Daniel Loss, professor of theoretical physics at the University of Basel, and one of the world’s top experts on the quantic phenomena of magnetic and electronic nanosystems, has been awarded the Marcel Benoist prize, widely considered the top Swiss science award, for his work on quantam computing.
Loss, 52, chairs the physics department at the University of Basel and is co-director of the Swiss NSF Nanoscale Center and director of the Center for Quantum Computing and Quantum Coherence (QC2), both at the University of Basel.
He has published nearly 300 papers in the field of solid physics.
The prize, with a monetary value of CHF100,000, is awarded annually to a scientist established in Switzerland for the importance of his or her scientifc work and its impact on humanity, over a number of years. It covers all scientific/humanitarian fields. It was created in 1920 by a French industrialist, Marcel Benoit, and while not endowed with the fortune of a Nobel prize, for example, its reputation and indirect government support has given it a name for being the Swiss Nobel prize in science.
Bern, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – The Huran reports, best known for its lists of China’s wealthiest people, says in its new The Best of Swiss Education 2011, that Switzerland now has 2,000 Chinese students, three times the number a decade ago. The inaugural guide for Chinese parents considering sending their children to Swiss schools, was printed in 20,000 copies and distributed free of charge to some of China’s wealthiest families.
“Four out of every five Chinese entrepreneurs today are considering sending their children to school overseas, “ says the series publisher and founder Rupert Hoogewerf. The series includes guides to education in the US and Britain, published in 2008 and 2009. “The Best of Swiss Education provides Chinese parents with a clear guide to Switzerland’s world class education system.”
When the book was launched during a two-day gala event in Shanghai in September, 14 Swiss schools participated, hoping to woo the 170 parents who attended the event.
IMD campus in Lausanne
Lausanne, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – IMD, Switzerland’s premier executive education institution, has launched an online contest challenging people to be open, collaborative and pioneering. The winner will receive a place in IMD’s most popular programme, Orchestrating Winning Performance.
The contest, Go Beyond What You Think Possible, opened 4 October and ends 4 February 2011 and is open to everyone over the age of 18.
Based around IMD’s core values, the contest is designed to build brand awareness. “At IMD we are constantly striving to innovate, to move ahead, and to go beyond what we think is possible in order to maintain our world-class standing,” says IMD President Dominique Turpin.
Daniel Borel at the groundbreaking of the Innovation Center at EPFL; it was inaugurated in September 2010, 15 months later (photo 2009, EPFL / Herzog)
Lausanne, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – The close relationship looks set to continue between EPFL, the Swiss federal polytechnic institute in Lausanne, and Daniel Borel, a graduate of the school and founder of Logitech. Borel Thursday 30 September helped inaugurate a new Innovation Center on the EPFL campus.
The company he founded, Logitech, is the first firm to take up space in the school’s new five-building centre.
Borel is best known as the man behind the computer mouse. Logitech’s early success was mainly due to the invention of the mouse, which came out of research performed by Jean-Daniel Nicoud, a professor at EPFL. Nicoud developed the first prototype, equipped with a ball and sensors, in the 1970s and Logitech created a production model for Hewlett-Packard in the 1980s.
School frees money for major investments
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) - One of the largest private schools in the Lake Geneva region, the College du Léman (CDL) in Versoix, at the edge of Geneva, has sold the land on which the school sits. Suva, Swiss accident insurance company based in Lucerne, is the buyer, making this its second major property investment in Geneva in 2010.
The news was spotted in Geneva’s Feuille d’Avis (official record) by the Tribune de Geneve, which says the unusual amount of the transaction, CHF85 million, made it stand out, as does the uncommonness of owners in the region selling expensive land and continuing to rent it. The sale covers 60 hectares, (ed. note: CHF141.7/m2), with the school having an 85-year lease as part of the sale agreement, according to the Tribune.
The news has not been announced publicly by the school or its parent company, Meritas Family of Schools in Fort Lauderdale, Florida in the US, which owns 19 schools around the world.
