Software engineering
Software Engineering is often seen as a project phase entirely independent from the implementation process. However, a software designer without a good idea of a Web server, or of the structure of a GUI, or of remote calls would be like an architect ignorant of the keystone or reinforced concrete. Developing a complex application requires the understanding of numerous and diverse concepts, scattered across the literature in books representing maybe several thousands of pages. Although no application requires all the features developed by the software community, a software engineer must have some detailed knowledge of those best suited to his or her project; this provides a much needed overview of the concepts that have a potential use in the application…
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Speech and language engineering
There is a strong difference in focus between the standard practice of theoretical linguistics and the practical needs of the developers of applied Natural Language Processing (NLP) systems. On one hand, theoretical linguists are primarily interested by the fundamental understanding of language, in particular how it functions, and how humans acquire it. In this perspective, they usually carry out in-depth studies of specific linguistic data, sometimes fairly marginal or belonging to dialectal varieties of major languages. On the other hand, NLP system developers need comprehensive descriptions, both in terms of syntax and vocabulary, of the languages to be processed. In this perspective, their main linguistic task is therefore to select a particular linguistic model and to complete within that model the description of the language(s) needed by the targeted applications.
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New stakes, new challenges for logistics
Historically, logistics was defined as the process of moving and positioning inventory to meet customer requirements at the lowest possible total landed cost. Over the decades, logistics moved from a very narrow preoccupation focused on transportation or inventory management to a larger vision embracing not only cost but also quality management and service provision. Large parts of the competitive advantage of an organization are due to the quality of service and especially to the ability of continuously improving and adapting the quality of service to specific needs of customers.
The office process redesign language
Office Process Redesign Language (OPRL) is a language for describing administrative processes in offices. OPRL addresses the problem of how to organize (or reorganize) an office using e-technology1 to the best advantage of the office, with the goal to deliver the required services for the organization to which it belongs. OPRL prescribes an approach to guide office process redesign, emphasizing incremental change and participation. The task of organizing an office involves the definition of: the services to be delivered by the office; the roles and responsibilities of the staff; the procedures to be followed; and the technological support. This task cannot be achieved without dialogue and agreement among the stakeholders of the office process. The purpose of OPRL is to provide support for those involved in office process redesign (managers, office staff, professional analysts and consultants), and to reorganize and implement office systems to improve service delivery and enhance the office-work environment.
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Rolex Learning Center
At a time when information technologies are transforming the intellectual landscape by eliminating physical boundaries between men and between disciplines, our duty, as a cutting-edge academic institution, is to offer students an appropriate learning platform that adapts to this unprecedented technological evolution. We had to imagine a place where students benefit from the best access to current systems of knowledge as well as its possible forms in the future, but also a place that stimulates the most vigorous and passionate whirlwinds of ideas, without which neither science nor art would exist in this world. We were thus not afraid to imagine a paradoxical space where the ever fascinating serenity of a library and the colorful noise of a central square cohabite – a tension lending itself to the propagation of knowledge. In dreaming about content, we also dreamt about identity. The rolex Learning center would only take on its full meaning if it were to become both the new heart of EPFL – a veritable center that has always been missing – and a unifying element for the city and the nearby university. How can any of us, whether researchers, students, or citizens, live without the cross-fertilization of influences, ideas, information, and cultures that allow for, since the beginning of time, the most fertile debates and the most beautiful discoveries?
The art of structures
The concept of structure has always been a fundamental aspect of building. Until the Renaissance the statics of constructions was based solely on experience, intuition, experimentation with models and empirical rules, but the scientific revolution transformed this discipline into a true science. Since the mid-1700s it has been possible to calculate structures, analyzing their mechanical behavior. Their most efficient form can be determined by mathematical means, and the measures required to ensure their strength and stability can be set by comparing the internal forces with the strength of the materials. Through the technological developments and new materials that have emerged during the industrial revolution, the science of construction has made a range of new structural solutions possible. This phase required greater specialization, and the builder was replaced by two professional roles: the architect and the engineer.
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The social fabric of the networked city
The Social Fabric of the Networked City aims to reconsider sociological perspectives on urban phenomena by proposing a dynamic exploration of the links between infrastructural and technological aspects of the urban order, power relations and everyday life experiences. This perspective circumvents the immaterial aura of post-modern urban analysis and the material determinism that characterizes the structural approach to the city.
Without going further into the artificial distinctions between technology and society, nature and culture, or science and politics, we propose to re-evaluate the role that objects play in the transformation of the city. What impact do forms and tools have on our perception of changes in the city? Which objects change space and cities? What is the impact of the formal dimensions of the urban space on guiding and/or shaping social and spatial experience?
Indeed, the urban phenomenon has been changing profoundly over the past decades, and numerous publications describe the deep changes affecting architecture, urbanism, geography, sociology, the economy and political science.
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Rem Koolhaas
Remmert Koolhaas was born in 1944 in Rotterdam, where bombing in World War II had erased, as in Berlin, the image of the historical city. With his family he moved to Jakarta, Indonesia, in 1952 and staying until 1956, and then to Brazil, where he admired the works of Oscar Niemeyer. Back in Holland he would often spend time drawing in the architecture studio of his grandfather, Dirk Roosenburg. In 1963 he began to work for the weekly of the Dutch liberal right, “De Haagse Post”, doing layout and writing on cinema, literature, music, politics, sports, sexuality, art and architecture (including articles on Hendricus Theodorus Wijdeveld and Le Corbusier, as well as interviews with Constant Nieuwenhuys and Federico Fellini). Like the rest of the editorial staff of the weekly, Koolhaas tried to purge his work of any comment other than description of the facts. Interviewees, for example, were asked no questions but simply shown a microphone, as if to comply with Surrealist tenets of automatic writing. “Not moralizing or interpreting (art-ificing) the reality, but intensifying it. Starting point: an uncompromising acceptance of reality”, the artist Armando advised, defining the approach of the journalists of “De Haagse Post”, outlined in greater depth in a guide written with the poet Hans Sleutelaar for the composition of articles.
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Microfabricated cortical neuroprostheses
The field of neuroprosthetics has important applications in medicine and science. In clinical settings, neural stimulation and recording implants promise to introduce new capabilities in restoring functions of the central nervous system (CNS) lost to trauma or disease. In basic research settings, neuroprosthetic devices remain one of the most important tools for those neuroscientists who work to elucidate the brain’s functions. Clinical therapies using neural stimulation include cochlear stimulation for the deaf; epidural spinal stimulation for the treatment of pain [3]; cortical or vagus nerve stimulation for epilepsy; and several other emerging indications including retinal stimulation for the blind. Neural stimulation in the brain has an established clinical history and has helped many patients lead a normal life. Deep brain stimulation, for example, targets the subthalamic nucleus to treat Parkinson’s disease and has also been shown efficacious for depression and obesity. In neuroscience, neuroprostheses have been used primarily as neural recording elements, which permit the acquisition of signals from a large number of single units or neuron ensembles in order to study network behaviour or control robotic prostheses. Many of these clinical and scientific applications have been enabled by, or can be improved with, the small size and density of electrode sites that microfabrication technology enables.
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Advanced fiber optics
Few techniques have had an impact on society that can compare to that of fiber optics. These tiny hair-sized glass wires have deeply transformed, at the dawn of this third millennium, access to information, modes of communicate, and even the behavior of consumers. This tremendous impact was rightfully honored by the presentation of the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physics to Charles K. Kao, who predicted in 1966, by careful calculations, that optical fibers could transmit a broadband signal over distances outperforming any existing transmission line. Since then, optical fibers have gradually occupied a more and more predominant place in the world of telecommunications, while deeply revolutionizing the field of optics by confining light in these small silica waveguides, transforming classical free-beam optics into a novel concept of wired optical circuits.
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