If that price/performance figure is accurate, it's true that you're better off with the latest anthropic/OpenAI models. At least if you want to ride the pareto frontier...
https://village.dev/blog/closed-ai-models-now-dominate-the-price-performance-frontier/
It seems our team got flagged
> Extremist penguins
For our use and push for open source tools.
I wear it as a badge of honor :)
Une équipe du Laboratoire de nanotechnologie chimique a repensé la manière dont les aptamères – de courts brins d’ADN utilisés dans les capteurs moléculaires – détectent leurs cibles. Leur approche pourrait permettre la mise au point de tests rapides pour détecter de petites molécules, telles que les hormones.
En savoir plus: https://actu.epfl.ch/news/une-nouvelle-architecture-de-detection-pour-les--2/
Scientists from the Laboratory of Chemical Nanotechnology have reimagined how aptamers – short DNA strands used in molecular sensors – detect their targets. Their versatile sensing method could enable rapid tests for small molecules like hormones and neurotransmitters.
Read more: https://actu.epfl.ch/news/a-new-sensing-architecture-to-detect-small-molec-2/
19h agoTwin sisters, two labs, one summer of discovery 🔬
Bahareh and Rayhaneh Einollahi joined Summer@EPFL from the University of Tehran to explore network security and faster text-search algorithms and experience research together.
🔗 Read the full story : https://news.epfl.ch/news/this-was-the-best-opportunity-that-could-happen--2/
20h ago🧬 Researchers led by Nako Nakatsuka of the @EPFL Laboratory of Chemical Nanotechnology (CHEMINA) have reimagined how aptamers – short DNA strands used in molecular sensors – detect their targets. Their versatile sensing method could enable the development of rapid lateral-flow tests, like those used in home pregnancy and Covid tests, for small molecules like hormones and neurotransmitters.
Read more about this work, now published in Nature Chemistry 🔗https://actu.epfl.ch/news/a-new-sensing-architecture-to-detect-small-molec-2/
23h agoResearchers at @EPFL and the The University of Manchester have uncovered how tiny blisters inside nanoscale channels allow artificial synapses to store information, offering new insights into the development of brain-inspired computing technologies. 🔗 Read the full study, now published in Nature Materials: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41563-026-02775-4
With today's hardware, just the energy consumption is 20 million years of sunlight on earth! I never thought about that...
Asking about the "black hole computer", Claude wrote:
> A 1 tonne black hole computer finishes in about 10^-10 s, with memory of about 10^22 bits (memory scales with M²). The catch is reading the result out of the Hawking radiation.
Oh, more problems :)
In case you like this kind of thoughts: https://claude.ai/share/2c8f7ac7-0267-442f-9584-e53e7c7bbba6
That's interesting - the usual "breaking RSA-4096 takes centuries", but what if you optimise by waiting for better hardware? Supposing big, universal quantum computers never make it...
Taking Moore into account, wait for 120 years, and then calculate for 3 years on the latest hardware.
But: you also have to take into account the energy use! And this will hit even worse: for RSA-4096, taking the "Landauer floor" of the energy required for a bit-flip, you need 5 years of ALL sunlight of earth!
AI is forcing us to pay off 40 years of technical debt
https://spectrum.ieee.org/ai-in-cybersecurity-php2shell-vulnerability
#AI #CyberSecurity #TechnicalDebt #LegacySystems #SecureByDesign #CodeQuality #DevSecOps #PHP2Shell
📢Talk: What 400 Drosophila papers tell us about reproducibility
By Bruno Lemaitre - Full professor, Global Health Institute, EPFL
💎 This session is part of our 20th Lunch Talks "Rethinking Open Access: Diamond OA and alternative publishing paths"
🎫 Register: https://go.epfl.ch/LT20
ℹ️ Full details: https://memento.epfl.ch/event/20th-lunch-talks-rethinking-open-access-diamond--2/
Margo Seltzer is the winner of the 2026 Erna Hamburger Award. She is a Canadian computer scientist, specialized in building software systems that introduce entirely new ways of doing things. Among them, the Berkeley DB database software. Seltzer will give a talk at our campus on 11 November.
Read more: https://actu.epfl.ch/news/i-m-an-accidental-computer-scientist/
Le Prix Erna Hamburger 2026 est décerné à Margo Seltzer. Scientifique canadienne spécialisée en informatique, elle est reconnue pour le développement de systèmes qui introduisent de nouvelles façons de faire les choses, dont le logiciel de base de données Berkeley DB. Elle donnera une conférence le 11 novembre sur le campus.
En savoir plus: https://actu.epfl.ch/news/je-suis-devenue-informaticienne-par-hasard/
I am quite surprised by the latest decision by our central IT department:
https://newsletter.epfl.ch/fr/newsletters/10a3686a-a2b6-4bdd-95f2-ab479276c5bd/render/
TLDR: all our tools which were available on gitlab, github, and other sources, are from now on private. Unless we think they should be public again. Perhaps...
Perhaps I'm paranoid after 35 years of Microsoft Embrace-Enhance-Extinguish, but to me this looks like one more attack on Open Source and Open Development...
Also, I'm not sure LMETA 9.1 had this in mind:
Driverless taxis are moving from pilot projects to real-world deployment. Researchers at EPFL, led by Kenan Zhang, are studying what cities must do it they want to integrate robotaxis without increasing congestion or weakening public transport.
Read more: https://actu.epfl.ch/news/how-cities-can-make-room-for-robotaxis/
Les taxis autonomes passent du stade de projets pilotes au déploiement à grande échelle. Une équipe de l’EPFL, menée par la chercheuse Kenan Zhang, étudie les mesures à prendre pour intégrer les robotaxis sans aggraver les embouteillages ni affaiblir les transports publics en ville.
Lire nore article: https://actu.epfl.ch/news/comment-les-villes-feront-elles-la-place-aux-robot/
11/3/2026📢 The Mastodon instance of :logo_epfl: has been successfully upgraded to the version v4.7.5 (https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/releases/tag/v4.7.5) under CHG0048596. This security release fixes, among others, a password authentication bypass for inactive accounts.
For reasons... I have been looking at our beloved EPFL's security.txt - and see that we have an outdated signature on our security email. And which didn't reply to my emails for the last two weeks. Nor to those of my colleague. Well, it was busy weeks...
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA256
Contact: mailto:security@epfl.ch
Expires: 2026-01-02T23:59:59.999Z
...
11/3/2026A chance decision set Anne-Marie Kermarrec on a path to a remarkable career in computer science. Today, the EPFL researcher works on decentralized systems and champions women in science.
🔗️️️️️️ Read the full story : https://news.epfl.ch/news/computer-science-seemed-like-something-with-a-fu-5/
https://rikiyat.github.io/blog/weight-space-programming/
This is really nice: LLMs directly updating the weights of another modem, in order to improve then. Not in a back propagation, gradient descent way, but changing one weight at the time.
Feels like brain surgery to me :)