D-INFK news channel

ETH Zurich is one of four selected universities around the world to establish adaptive compute research clusters with teams from Xilinx, a company that develops highly flexible and adaptive processing platforms to enable rapid innovation across a variety of technologies.

In this interview, pioneer fellow Mohsen Ewaida (group Prof. Alonso) speaks about his first software product "SnowBell", using Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) devices to run machine-learning applications.

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.

Congratulations to Zsolt István, Stefan Bauer, and Josip Djolonga for obtaining the ETH Medal for their outstanding doctoral theses.

Human-​computer interaction, machine vision, performance and energy scalability, mobile computing, and data center optimization – these are some of the most significant challenges that computer science will have to face in the years to come. In the Microsoft Research - Swiss Joint Research Center, a collaborative research engagement between Microsoft Research, EPFL and ETH Zurich, science and industry try to tackle these challenges together. Professor Gustavo Alonso elaborates.

'Reaching for the stars' has become a down-​to-earth endeavor: data-​driven, information-​rich and fast-​paced results in information technology are at the very heart of astronomy. Data-​based science is becoming recognized as a stand-​alone research area - ranking with theory and experimentation. Astroinformatics is a new discipline emerging at the intersection of astronomy/astrophysics, applied computer science and advanced statistics.

ETH Zurich and EPFL are jointly entering into a new research partnership with Microsoft Research. Over five years, Microsoft Research will provide five million Swiss francs of funding to support IT research projects. Microsoft researchers will also work closely with the scientists at the two universities.

Every year, ACM recognizes some of its members for their contribution to computing. In 2012, two D-INFK Professors have been elected to the grade of Fellow: Prof. Gustavo Alonso for contributions to distributed systems, middleware, and data management, Prof. Markus Gross for contributions to computer graphics and animation.

Every year, the Fritz Kutter fund awards outstanding industry-​related theses in computer science. In 2010, René Müller, a former doctoral student with Prof. Alonso, received this sought-​after prize. Currently based at the IBM Research Center in Almaden, René came over to Zurich on November 22 to take home his "trophy" – a good opportunity to talk to him about his passion for research, visions and how he would make Zurich a better place for IT.

Prof. Gustavo Alonso has recently received the VLDB 10 Year Best Paper Award. This award has been established for the author(s) whose paper appeared in the VLDB conference 10 years ago and has had the most impact on database research since then. In the interview, Prof. Alonso talks on the significance of this award and the impact of his remarkable research achievements on society, as well as business and industry.