Publications associées à New lakes in deglaciating high-mountain regions – opportunities and risks

Quartiers rhodaniens en transition

Over the course of history, the relationship between cities and their waters has shown different gradients of interweaving, marked by cycles of bonding and distancing. Following a period of complete neglect of urban watercourses, the versatile, multifacete ...

EPFL2024

Using automated design appraisal to model building-specific devaluation risk due to land-use change

Adam Robert Swietek

Uncertainty of spillover effects – including property devaluation - from proposed land-use change elicits opposition to local development. This hinders cities’ ability to implement land-use policy aimed at housing affordability and environmental sustainabi ...

2024

Echoing Swiss Coloniality. Land, Archive and Visuality between Brazil and Switzerland

Denise Bertschi

Informed by longstanding artistic practice, this doctoral thesis approaches entanglements of Swiss coloniality in Brazil and Switzerland under the lens of land, archive, and visuality. The enduring legacies of imperial capitalism in the former Colonia Leop ...

EPFL2024

Ontology-based Knowledge Representation for Traditional Martial Arts

Yumeng Hou, Sarah Irene Brutton Kenderdine

Traditional martial arts are treasures of humanity's knowledge and critical carriers of sociocultural memories throughout history. However, such treasured practices have encountered various challenges in knowledge transmission and now feature many entries ...

2024

The microbial genomics of glacier-fed streams: adaptations to an extreme ecosystem

Massimo Bourquin

Glacier-fed streams are the cold, ultra-oligotrophic, and unstable streams that are fed by glacial meltwater. Despite these extreme conditions, they harbour a diverse and abundant microbial diversity that develops into biofilms, covering the boulders and s ...

EPFL2024

Machine Learning for Modeling Stock Returns

Teng Andrea Xu

Throughout history, the pace of knowledge and information sharing has evolved into an unthinkable speed and media. At the end of the XVII century, in Europe, the ideas that would shape the "Age of Enlightenment" were slowly being developed in coffeehouses, ...

EPFL2024

A lunar reconnaissance drone for cooperative exploration and high-resolution mapping of extreme locations

Erik Uythoven, Thomas Pfeiffer, Daniel Tataru, David Rodriguez Martinez

An efficient characterization of scientifically significant locations is essential prior to the return of humans to the Moon. The highest resolution imagery acquired from orbit of south-polar shadowed regions and other relevant locations remains, at best, ...

Pergamon-Elsevier Science Ltd2024

Assessment framework for deepfake detection in real-world situations

Touradj Ebrahimi, Yuhang Lu

Detecting digital face manipulation in images and video has attracted extensive attention due to the potential risk to public trust. To counteract the malicious usage of such techniques, deep learning-based deepfake detection methods have been employed and ...

2024

Into the ice: Exploration and data capturing in glacial moulins by a tethered robot

Josephine Anna Eleanor Hughes, Max Mirko Polzin

Glacial moulins (cylindrical meltwater drainage shafts) provide valuable insights into glacier dynamics, but are inaccessible and hazardous environments for humans to study. Exploring them using passive sensor probes has revealed their complex geometry, wh ...

Wiley2024

Spatiotemporal Dynamics of Flow and Hydrochemistry in Drainage Networks

Izabela Bujak-Ozga

Despite their high ecological value, non-perennial streams have received less attention than their perennial counterparts. This doctoral thesis addresses this disparity by advancing knowledge on the dynamics of the drainage density and hydrologic processes ...

EPFL2024

On the Generalization of Stochastic Gradient Descent with Momentum

Volkan Cevher, Kimon Antonakopoulos

While momentum-based accelerated variants of stochastic gradient descent (SGD) are widely used when training machine learning models, there is little theoretical understanding on the generalization error of such methods. In this work, we first show that th ...

Microtome Publishing2024

Quasi-operando Transmission Electron Microscopy Diagnostics for Electrocatalytic Processes in Liquids

Vasiliki Tileli

It is of great interest to the energy community to understand how the mechano-physico-chemical phenomena that eventually lead to device degradation are related to the startup, operation, and shutdown phases. For electrocatalytic systems operating in liquid ...

Swiss Chemical Soc2024

Spatial Modeling for Building Design Evaluation: from Visual Landscape Quality Assessment to Devaluation Risk Estimation

Adam Robert Swietek

Zoning reform is a crucial tool for cities to adapt to contemporary challenges. However, its implementation remains challenging. Property owners, with a vested interest in the value of their neighborhoods, are sensitive to local developments and the potent ...

EPFL2024

A comprehensive review on geomembrane systems application in hydropower

Giovanni De Cesare, Samuel Luke Vorlet

Geomembrane systems have been used at hydropower plants as rehabilitation and mitigation technology for several decades and are now used worldwide. In the context of planning an energy transition that promotes the sustainable use of water resources for ene ...

2024

Numerical simulation of the fate, transport and public health risks of enteric viruses in Lake Geneva

Chaojie Li

Lakes are a fundamental feature of nature with brilliance, profoundness and complexity. Various of physical, chemical and biological changes take place three dimensionally in deep lakes, regulated by complicated boundary conditions. To understand and predi ...

EPFL2023

Bayes Security: A Not So Average Metric

Carmela González Troncoso, Giovanni Cherubin

Security system designers favor worst-case security metrics, such as those derived from differential privacy (DP), due to the strong guarantees they provide. On the downside, these guarantees result in a high penalty on the system's performance. In this pa ...

IEEE2023

Homogeneous Environmental Selection Structures the Bacterial Communities of Benthic Biofilms in Proglacial Floodplain Streams

Leïla Ezzat, Tom Ian Battin, Hannes Markus Peter, Jade Brandani, Tyler Joe Kohler, Stylianos Fodelianakis, Massimo Bourquin, Susheel Bhanu Busi, Grégoire Marie Octave Edouard Michoud

Streams draining proglacial floodplains harbor benthic biofilms comprised of diverse microbial communities. These high-mountain ecosystems are rapidly changing with climate warming, and it is therefore critical to better understand the mechanisms underlyin ...

AMER SOC MICROBIOLOGY2023

Can one hear the shape of a target zone?

Max-Olivier Hongler

We develop an exchange rate target zone model with finite exit time and non-Gaussian tails. We show how the tails are a consequence of time-varying investor risk aversion, which generates mean-preserving spreads in the fundamental distribution. We solve ex ...

2023

Relating health benefits of water, sanitation, and hygiene services with the context of urban informal settlements: lessons from Côte d'Ivoire and Kenya

Vitor Pessoa Colombo

This thesis is inscribed in the recent efforts to reconnect urban planning and public health. It focused on the context of sub-Saharan African cities, for they offer invaluable lessons regarding environmental health determinants and potential solutions to ...

EPFL2023

Unlocking a multimodal archive of Southern Chinese martial arts through embodied cues

Yumeng Hou, Sarah Irene Brutton Kenderdine, Fadel Mamar Seydou

Purpose: Despite being an authentic carrier of various cultural practices, the human body is often underutilised to access the knowledge of human body. Digital inventions today have created new avenues to open up cultural data resources, yet mainly as appa ...

2023