D-INFK news channel

For his thesis “A Programming Language Approach to Smart Contract Privacy”, former doctoral student Dr Samuel Steffen received the prestigious ACM SIGSAC Doctoral Dissertation Runner-Up Award. Congratulations!

The treatment of children born with cleft lip and palate typically includes the use of therapeutic intraoral plates before surgical closure of the cleft. Now, researchers from the Department of Computer Science have teamed up with clinical care researchers at the University Hospital Basel to create a digital pipeline that enables the automatic production of the plates.

Dr Chengyu Zhang has been a postdoc in the Advanced Software Technologies (AST) Lab of Professor Zhendong Su since the beginning of 2022. He joined the group after completing his doctorate at the East China Normal University (ECNU) in 2021. He had come to ETH Zurich before, as a visiting doctoral student in Professor Su’s group in 2018 and 2019.

Large language models such as GPT-​3 are able to learn new concepts by interacting with their users. Doctoral student Johannes von Oswald reports in an interview on what lies behind this ability.

David Dao recently defended his doctoral thesis, conducted in the ETH Systems Group under the supervision of Professors Ce Zhang and Gustavo Alonso. His childhood fascination for Albert Einstein led him all the way from Munich to ETH Zurich. During his doctorate, he discovered a lot about himself, what he is passionate about and the value of thinking outside the box.

Xenia Hofmeier attended high school in Basel before coming to ETH Zurich to study computer science. Now in her second year of a doctorate in the Information Security Group of Professor David Basin, she is learning to manage her workload and time between teaching and research, and between short and long-term assignments

After winning the Golden Owl in 2020, Dr. Ghislain Fourny receives the Credit Suisse Award for Best Teaching at this year's ETH day on 19 November. Congratulations!

A team of cryptographers, led by Professor Kenny Paterson, conducted extensive testing on the New Zealand-​based cloud platform Mega. In doing so, they discovered security holes that would allow the provider to decrypt and manipulate customer data.

Postdoc Moritz Geilinger visited the Pestalozzi School Camps to show children what a robotics researcher does and how robots can be used in the real world.

In this video, postdoc Ece Özkan Elsen talks about her return to research, why she loves medical data science, and how she works to support other women in computer science.

Almost 70 D-INFK researchers and students attended a talk and Q&A session on October 28 to learn about the complex process of applying for – and getting – faculty positions.

For a week in September, scientific staff at the Department of Computer Science met in the picturesque mountain town of Scuol, Switzerland for a double-edition of the annual VMI Summer Retreat.

Kristina Hostáková joined Professor Dennis Hofheinz’s research group at the Institute of Theoretical Computer Science last December as a postdoc. In this interview, she talks about asymmetric cryptography, her experiences on the path to ETH Zurich and the promotion of women in computer science.

Video conferences instead of social coffee breaks and a very short commute to work. In order to slow the rapid spread of the coronavirus, most members of the Department of Computer Science are now working from home. Read how they are experiencing their new reality.

To slow down the spread of the coronavirus, most ETH staff had to move their teaching duties and research to their home offices. However, collaboration and communication must be re-invented and everyone needs to adapt to the new routine. Alexander Viand, president of the association of scientific staff at D-INFK, is now working from home, too. Read his estimate of the current mood of the scientific staff and his recommendations for how to work from home successfully.

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.

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.

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!

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.

Dana Drachsler Cohen is an outstanding IT specialist at ETH Zurich. The Israeli researcher is working on the security of systems such as autonomous vehicles and cryptocurrencies.

Mirroring the international spirit at the Department of Computer Science, our students share their points of view and describe their impression of ETH, their studies and future personal as well as professional goals in Switzerland.