Publications related to Communication

3D diffractive optics for linear interconnects and nonlinear processing

The optical domain presents potential avenues for enhancing both computing and communication due to its inherent properties of bandwidth, parallelism, and energy efficiency. This research focuses on harnessing 3-Dimensional (3D) diffractive optics for nove ...

EPFL2024

How to Support Students to Cultivate Psychological Safety in their Teams

Francesco Mondada, Jessica Elke Dehler Zufferey, Yousef Jalali

The importance of psychological safety in teams has been demonstrated in different settings. Team performance improves when team climate allows team members to be their authentic selves, to ask questions and raise concerns comfortably. However, it is less ...

EPFL2024

On the Theory and Practice of Modern Secure Messaging

Daniel Patrick Collins

Billions of people now have conversations daily over the Internet. A large portion of this communication takes place via secure messaging protocols that offer "end-to-end encryption'" guarantees and resilience to compromise like the widely-used Double Ratc ...

EPFL2024

Quantifying the biomimicry gap in biohybrid robot-fish pairs

Francesco Mondada, Vaios Papaspyros

Biohybrid systems in which robotic lures interact with animals have become compelling tools for probing and identifying the mechanisms underlying collective animal behavior. One key challenge lies in the transfer of social interaction models from simulatio ...

2024

Planetary-Scale Byzantine Fault Tolerance

Matteo Monti

The scale and pervasiveness of the Internet make it a pillar of planetary communication, industry and economy, as well as a fundamental medium for public discourse and democratic engagement. In stark contrast with the Internet's decentralized infrastructur ...

EPFL2024

The evolution of behavioral cues and signaling in displaced communication

Dario Floreano, Laurent Keller

Displaced communication, whereby individuals communicate regarding a subject that is not immediately present (spatially or temporally), is one of the key features of human language. It also occurs in a few animal species, most notably the honeybee, where t ...

2023

Get More for Less in Decentralized Learning Systems

Anne-Marie Kermarrec, Rafael Pereira Pires, Akash Balasaheb Dhasade, Rishi Sharma, Milos Vujasinovic, Jeffrey Wigger

Decentralized learning (DL) systems have been gaining popularity because they avoid raw data sharing by communicating only model parameters, hence preserving data confidentiality. However, the large size of deep neural networks poses a significant challeng ...

IEEE2023

Hypergraph-Based Fast Distributed AC Power Flow Optimization

Colin Neil Jones, Yuning Jiang, Yingzhao Lian, Xinliang Dai

This paper presents a novel distributed approach for solving AC power flow (PF) problems. The optimization problem is reformulated into a distributed form using a communication structure corresponding to a hypergraph, by which complex relationships between ...

IEEE2023

Non-verbal Communication between Humans and Robots: Imitation, Mutual Understanding and Inferring Object Properties

Nuno Ricardo Ferreira Duarte

Humans can express their actions and intentions, resorting to verbal and/or non-verbal communication. In verbal communication, humans use language to express, in structured linguistic terms, the desired action they wish to perform. Non-verbal communication ...

EPFL2023

A digital bridge between brain and spinal cord restores walking after paralysis

Grégoire Courtine, Jocelyne Bloch

Spinal-cord injury interrupts communication between the brain and spinal cord, leading to paralysis. An implant that decodes the brain signals that control movements and drives electrical stimulation of the spinal cord re-establishes this communication, en ...

NATURE PORTFOLIO2023

Genomics and conservation: Guidance from training to analyses and applications

Annie Sandrine Guillaume

Environmental change is intensifying the biodiversity crisis and threatening species across the tree of life. Conservation genomics can help inform conservation actions and slow biodiversity loss. However, more training, appropriate use of novel genomic me ...

Wiley2023

Diffusion of energy technologies: the role and dynamics of supply-side information networks

Claudia Rebeca Binder Signer, Romano Tobias Wyss, Gloria Serra Coch, Maria Anna Hecher

The diffusion of energy technologies is key for supporting the energy transition. While social influence and peer effects have been extensively studied on the demand side and found to impact adoption, less focus has been given to the role of information ne ...

2023

Referencing in YouTube Knowledge Communication Videos

Daniel Gatica-Perez, Haeeun Kim

In recent years, there has been widespread concern about misinformation and hateful content on social media that are damaging societies. Being one of the most influential social media that practically serves as a newsearch engine, YouTube has accepted crit ...

Assoc Computing Machinery2023

Model Predictive Control for Multi-Agent Systems under Limited Communication and Time-Varying Network Topology

Danilo Saccani, Melanie Nicole Zeilinger

In control system networks, reconfiguration of the controller when agents are leaving or joining the network is still an open challenge, in particular when operation constraints that depend on each agent's behavior must be met. Drawing our motivation from ...

IEEE2023

Byzantine consensus is Θ(n^2): the Dolev-Reischuk bound is tight even in partial synchrony!

Rachid Guerraoui, Jovan Komatovic, Manuel José Ribeiro Vidigueira, Pierre Philippe Civit, Vincent Gramoli, Seth Gilbert

The Dolev-Reischuk bound says that any deterministic Byzantine consensus protocol has (at least) quadratic (in the number of processes) communication complexity in the worst case: given a system with n processes and at most f < n/3 failures, any solution t ...

2023

Time vs. Truth: Age-Distortion Tradeoffs and Strategies for Distributed Inference

Yunus Inan

In 1948, Claude Shannon laid the foundations of information theory, which grew out of a study to find the ultimate limits of source compression, and of reliable communication. Since then, information theory has proved itself not only as a quest to find the ...

EPFL2023

Distributed Optimization with Byzantine Robustness Guarantees

Lie He

As modern machine learning continues to achieve unprecedented benchmarks, the resource demands to train these advanced models grow drastically. This has led to a paradigm shift towards distributed training. However, the presence of adversariesâ whether ma ...

EPFL2023

Human-Robot Swarm Interaction: An Explorative Path to Foster Complex Systems Understanding

Hala Khodr

Order, regularities, and patterns are ubiquitous around us. A flock of birds maneuvering in the sky, the self-organization of social insects, a global pandemic or a traffic jam are examples of complex systems where the macroscopic patterns arise from the m ...

EPFL2023

Hybrid Wireless-Local Communication via Information Propagation for Modular Robotic Synchronization Applications

Jamie Paik, Kevin Andrew Holdcroft, Christoph Heinrich Belke, Alexander Thomas Sigrist

Modular robots hold promise of adaptability, robustness, and versatility. Synchronization of modules is critical; if a module is asynchronous, not only will the robot fail to perform tasks properly, but its behavior may be self-destructive through self-col ...

WILEY2022

Effect of Different Communication Affordances on the Emergence of Collaboration Strategies in an Online Multiplayer Game

Pierre Dillenbourg, Barbara Bruno, Hala Khodr, Aditi Kothiyal

In a group, the collective dynamics is governed by the inter- actions between individuals, which can manifest differently depending on the available means of communication. In this paper, we compare 3 conditions of communication affordances (global chat, l ...

Springer2022