Spotlights 2019

Doctoral student David Dao develops intelligent algorithms that use satellite and drone images of rainforests to predict deforestation. Today, he will be presenting his research at the climate conference in Madrid.

Dr. Hermann Lehner is appointed new head of the Academic Services. He takes over from Dr. Dieter Wüest on July 1, 2020, who has served in this important position for 15 years.

Dr. David Cock, a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for Computing Platforms, received the ACM SIGOPS 2019 Hall of Fame award for a paper he co-authored ten years ago.

Professor David Basin has been selected as an individual member of the Swiss Academy of Engineering Sciences (SATW).

We are proud to announce that Professor Markus Püschel has been named an IEEE Fellow. He is being recognised for contributions to the implementation of signal processing techniques.

Congratulations to Ioana Giurgiu, Oriana Riva, Dejan Juric, Ivan Krivulev, and Gustavo Alonso who have been awarded the Test-of-Time Award of the ACM/IFIP/Usenix International Middleware Conference 2019 for their paper “Calling the Cloud: Enabling mobile phones as interfaces to cloud applications", published in Middleware 2009.

A donation from the Werner Siemens Foundation is helping to finance a project in which ETH researchers are looking to develop a fundamentally new security architecture.

Ryan Cotterell's research focuses on human languages with regard to scientific knowledge, automated processing and artificial intelligence.

Congratulations to Prof. Srdjan Capkun for receiving this fellowship for his contributions to systems and wireless network security. Its most prestigious member grade, the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) annually recognises the top 1% of ACM members for their outstanding accomplishments in computing and information technology as well as their service to the computing community.

Senior scientist Dr. Barbara Solenthaler received one of the first grants from the Botnar Research Centre for Child Health. Her project aims to optimise the surgical treatment of cleft lip and palate with the use of machine learning algorithms, smartphone images and 3D printing.

ETH computer scientists Debopam Bhattacherjee and Prof. Ankit Singla are proposing a novel network design that could double the network capacity of “Internet from space” systems.

Professor Stelian Coros has received an ERC Consolidator Grant. He aims to develop the computational and mathematical foundations for robots that exploit compliant materials as effectively as humans and animals do.

Hector Garcia-Molina, professor of computer science and electrical engineering at Stanford University and honorary doctor of the Department of Computer Science at ETH Zurich, passed away at 65.

Congratulations to Marcin Copik as well as Grzegorz Kwasniewski and team for winning major student awards at the International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage, and Analysis (SC19) in Denver, USA.

The ACM Gordon Bell Prize, the most prestigious prize in the area of supercomputing, has been awarded to two research teams from the Department of Computer Science and the Department of Electrical Engineering for developing a simulation that maps heat in transistors.

Professor Peter Müller, the retiring Director of Studies of the Department of Computer Science, looks back on two and a half years in office and takes stock. In this interview, he talks about the highlights of his job and how teaching has changed at D-INFK.

The Golden Owl is awarded annually by the VSETH to honour lecturers for excellent teaching.

At the age of 81, the ETH professor emeritus of Computer Science Jürg Nievergelt passed away this October. He had been instrumental in the founding of the Department of Computer Science.

Three doctoral students from the computer science department win the ETH Medal for their outstanding doctoral theses. Congratulations!

Postdoctoral researcher Felix Günther received this significant award in the field of computer and information security at the 26th ACM Computer and Communication Security Conference in London, UK.

Severin Hacker, D-INFK alumnus and founder of the language-learning platform Duolingo was chosen as Entrepreneur of the Year by One Young World.

Professor Timothy Roscoe was invited to speak at the Unix 50 event at Nokia Bell Labs, celebrating 50 years of Unix operating systems and providing an outlook to the future of computing.

Professor Markus Gross is among the thirty-two computer visualisation leaders who have been inducted into the IEEE Visualization Academy. The Academy recognises individuals who have made substantial contributions to the field of visualisation.

Marina Draskovic came to us from the University of Novi Sad, Serbia, and spent her Student Summer Research Fellowship (SSRF) as part of Professor Friedemann Mattern’s team, where she helped develop an app that measures fatigability in patients with multiple sclerosis.

They are lecturers, scientists, software developers and innovators: the Senior Scientists Focus Education at the Department of Computer Science are responsible for teaching computer science at other departments. But they also do much more than just teach.

Six students of the Department of Computer Science were awarded with an Excellence Scholarship & Opportunity Programme (ESOP) scholarship. Congratulations!

Self-​driving cars, the automatic detection of cancer cells, online translation: deep learning makes it all possible. The ETH spin-​off Mirage Technologies has developed a deep learning platform that aims to help start-​ups and companies more quickly develop and optimise their products.

For the second time, computer science students at ETH Zurich are organizing VIScon – a unique combination of a symposium and a hackathon. The three-day event, packed with talks, workshops and coding, enables students to get a deeper insight into computer science, engineering and entrepreneurship.

Can you turn a semester project into a business idea? Yes, of course! The video game Unrailed!, developed by Hendrik Baatz, Thomas Lang, Lukas Rahmann and Thomas Wolf as part of the Game Programming Laboratory course, has garnered worldwide interest at trade shows and in the media. On 9 September 2019, it became the first game developed at the Department of Computer Science to be commercially available.

Dennis Hofheinz makes significant contributions to topics such as e-voting, blockchain systems and digital money and will strengthen the important area of cybersecurity.

For the fourth time, an eleven-person jury from the Swiss business magazine BILANZ has selected the one hundred most important brains at the forefront of digitalisation – Professor Srdjan Capkun, Professor Andreas Krause and alumnus Dr. Lorenz Meier are amongst them.

Christian Holz officially joined the Department of Computer Science of ETH Zurich in August 2019 as Tenure Track Assistant Professor of Computer Science. Get to know him in this short interview.

Rasmus Kyng officially joined the Department of Computer Science at ETH Zurich at the beginning of September 2019 as Tenure Track Assistant Professor of Theoretical Computer Science. Get to know him in this short interview.

Join doctoral student Oliver Glauser from the Interactive Geometry Lab in this video as he introduces a data glove which can capture accurate hand motions in real time.

Two research groups from ETH Zurich have developed a method that can simulate nanoelectronics devices and their properties realistically, quickly, and efficiently. This offers a ray of hope for the industry and data centre operators alike, both of which are struggling with the (over)heating that comes with increasingly small and powerful transistors - and with the high resulting electricity costs for cooling.

A team of physicists and computer scientists at ETH Zurich have programmed computers to teach themselves how to extract relevant information from maps of the universe.

Bernhard Schölkopf, Director of the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems and Affiliated Professor at ETH Zurich, today received the Körber European Science Prize for his research in the field of machine learning and artificial intelligence.

Universities play an increasingly important role in society creating an environment where talents, like graduate student David Yenicelik, thrive. A co-​founder of Skilllab, Yenicelik develops artificial intelligence to uncover roadmaps that guide refugees on how to integrate into local labour markets.

Professor Mohsen Ghaffari has received an ERC Starting Grant. In his ERC project, he plans to tackle problems in distributed graph algorithms and to develop efficient massively parallel algorithms.

Are there limits to what computers are actually able to compute, and do quantum computers really solve more problems than conventional computers? Computer scientist Scott Aaronson will discuss these kinds of fundamental questions during the Paul Bernays Lectures 2019.

Prof. Andreas Krause and five further authors were honoured with lifetime achievement in their approach to outbreak detection, featured in their research paper "Cost-Effective Outbreak Detection in Networks".

The ACM SIGGRAPH Academy honours Prof. Markus Gross with a membership for his contributions in computer graphics and interactive techniques.

Professor Thomas Gross is retiring at the end of July, but will still continue to support the department in teaching.

As a female computer scientist, Julia Chatain has experienced many conscious and unconscious biases. With her work at ETH Zurich’s Game Technology Center, she aims to refute such prejudices for future generations and to show everyone – not least the women themselves – that yes, women can code!

Prof. Kenny Paterson, head of the Applied Cryptography Group, explains the secret behind prime numbers and how they matter to our daily lives.

20 international students explore their favourite research topic while working within a research group at the Department of Computer Science.

Vasiliki Kalavri didn’t know anything about computer science before she encountered it at university. Today, she is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Computer Science at ETH Zurich. Dr. Kalavri and her team are building Strymon, a next-generation stream processing system that is faster, more flexible and more autonomous than existing systems.

Dr. Rasmus Kyng conducts research in theoretical computer science with a focus on algorithm theory and theoretical aspects of data science.

Dr. Siyu Tang focuses on the development of computer-aided processes for the perception and digitalisation of people and their activities in complex and natural environments.

Mrinmaya Sachan explores concepts and methods of machine learning for the comprehension of natural language.

Dr. Ana Klimovic’s research areas include computer architecture, cloud computing, computer systems and data centre architecture.

Professor Valentina Boeva officially joined the Department of Computer Science of ETH Zurich in early June 2019 as Tenure Track Assistant Professor of Biomedical Informatics. Get to know her in this short interview.

The 2019 ACM SIGARCH Maurice Wilkes Award goes to Prof. Onur Mutlu for "innovative contributions in efficient and secure DRAM systems".

This year's ACM SIGPLAN Robin Milner Young Researcher Award goes to Prof. Martin Vechev for his contributions in the area of programming languages.

Professor Julia Vogt officially joined the Department of Computer Science of ETH Zurich at the beginning of May 2019 as Tenure Track Assistant Professor of Medical Data Science. Get to know her in this short interview.

Researchers from the Max Planck ETH Center for Learning Systems and Google Research Zurich received the Best Paper Award at the International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML).

Dr. Pascal Bérard has received the Eurographics Best PhD Thesis Award for his contributions to geometric modeling focusing on eye modeling for digital human avatars.

Data science methods have applications in many different fields in academia and industry. To foster the adoption of data-driven science, the Swiss Data Science Center was founded two and a half years ago. Jointly backed by ETH Zurich and EPFL and supported by the computer science departments of both universities, the centre has already made significant progress towards its goal to make data science more open, transparent and accessible in both academia and industry.

Dr. Barbara Solenthaler from the Computer Graphics Laboratory has received the prestigious TUM-​IAS Hans-​Fischer Fellowship.

Congratulations to Team Kassiopeia, who took home the prize for “Most Creative Policy Response Alternative” during this year’s Cyber 9/12 Strategy Challenge.

Timothy Roscoe is a Full Professor in the Systems Group at the Department of Computer Science at ETH Zurich. He has led the effort to build Enzian, a uniquely flexible research computer that will allow researchers to study many different areas of computer science without requiring specialised hardware, thus bringing academic studies and the realities of industry closer together.

Doctoral student Francesco Locatello has received the Google PhD Fellowship. With this fellowship, Google acknowledges his contributions to foundations of optimization algorithms and provides funding for his education and research.

Professor Kenneth Paterson officially joined the Department of Computer Science of ETH Zurich at the beginning of April 2019. He will be leading the newly established Applied Cryptography group. Get to know him in this short interview.

Bob Sumner, associate director at Disney Research Zurich and D-INFK adjunct professor, is driving innovation of augmented reality technology.

Timon Gehr from the Secure, Reliable, and Intelligent Systems Lab (SRI) has received the 2019 IBM PhD Fellowship Award.

Viruses, crime, and many other problems spread through networks. ETH researchers have now developed a new method of protecting them cost-effectively.

Computational thinking and programming skills are likely to become even more essential in the future. Dr Stéphane Magnenat and the Game Technology Center team at ETH Zurich are working on new ways to teach programming to children and make the experience enriching, creative and playful.

On March 19, 2019, ETH Zurich presented the Spark Award 2019. The award recognizes the most promising invention that ETH transfer filed for a patent in 2018. Two of the nominated projects came from D-​INFK.

The focus of Julia Vogt's research is on machine learning methods in the life sciences, and the use of algorithms for biomedical data analysis.

Valentina Boeva develops analysis algorithms which are used to investigate changes in genetic information and epigenetic imprinting in tumours.

Electronic devices can spark kids’ creativity, says Stéphane Magnenat from the Game Technology Center. But doing so requires apps that bridge the real and virtual worlds.

ETH doctoral students of computer science show how linking two popular technologies can have highly problematic consequences for web services.

Researchers from D-INFK and Disney Research had the honour of receiving a Sci-Tech Oscar in Hollywood for their capture system, Medusa.

The foundations for internet communication were laid down in the previous century and have undergone very little modernisation since. With their spin-off Anapaya Systems, Adrian Perrig, David Basin and Peter Müller, professors at the ETH Zurich Department of Computer Science, want to bring the internet into the 21st century and make it a secure and reliable means of communication.

This February, Professor Peter Widmayer received professor emeritus status after 27 year of teaching and research at ETH Zurich. D-INFK says thank you.

On January 24, 2019, Tal Ben-Nun was named one of 2019’s 30 most influential people in technology under the age of 30 (“30 under 30”) by Forbes Israel.

The new ETH+ initiative to strengthen data science, spread across several departments, was launched in January 2019.

After two and a half years as the Head of the Department of Computer Science, Professor Emo Welzl is stepping down. In a wide-ranging interview, the outgoing Department Head talks about the future of computer science, the balance between theory and practice, and the importance of appointing new professors.

ETH Zurich spin-​off ChainSecurity has discovered a vulnerability in a scheduled upgrade to the Ethereum blockchain platform – in the nick of time.

D-INFK is headed to Davos during the World Economic Forum, January 22-25. A visit to ETH Zurich's Pavilion will have you RETHINKING DESIGN in an entirely new context: design your own robot, meet SAM the soft robotic hand, and play a video game you built yourself.