![\"Programme](\"https://www.epfl.ch/campus/art-culture/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/LES_CULTURELLES_1920x1080_programme_complet.png\")
\r\n\r\nThis workshop is for staff and researchers working in NGOs and non-profits who aim to bring AI into their workflows with an ethical, careful approach. Join us for a hands-on morning of using and deploying the flagship model of the Swiss AI Initiative, learn first hand from the engineers and scientists working on Apertus.
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\r\nThe workshop runs from 9:30 to 12:30 at the EPFL AI Center Lounge in Lausanne. Doors open at 9:00.
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\r\nBackground: Apertus is a fully open large language model built in Switzerland, which is fully reproducible and can run on your own infrastructure. As a Foundation Model, it has already been adapted to specific contexts through post-training and fine-tuning processes. In addition to open access at all Swiss academic institutions, a growing number of Swiss and international commercial providers support Apertus for production deployment.
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\r\nThis workshop is also designed as a two-way conversation: alongside learning how to use and deploy Apertus, we want to hear how your organization is already working with AI, and where today's tools still fall short for you. We would like to hear about the languages, legal contexts, and use cases you operate in. This input will give us the opportunity to prioritize improvements for non-profit organizations on the Apertus roadmap.
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\r\nAt this workshop, you will have the chance to:\r\n
Thanks to a donation from the Claude Latour Foundation, the Pôle Culture (VPI) is organizing a master class followed by a public concert based on the Verbier Festival archives, which are being digitized at EPFL by the EPFL Cultural Heritage & Conservation Platform (CHC).
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\r\nDuring the masterclass, the selected students are invited to create a musical piece lasting no more than 5 minutes in the style, aesthetic, and genre of their choice (jazz, rap, rock, metal, classical, etc.). At the end of the day, the pieces will be presented to the public, accompanied by comments from a panel of experts.
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\r\nPROGRAM:\r\n
\r\n\r\nGenerative AI has become a part of students' everyday working life. If used without guidance, GenAI can cause over-reliance and leave students with a distorted sense of what they have actually learned. Most research and practice have focused on how we can scaffold students' GenAI use, for example through prompts, guardrails, or redesigned tasks. This talk asks a simpler question that has received far less attention. When should students be allowed to use AI so that it helps their learning?
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\r\nIn this lunch&LEARN session, Janne Rotter turns to a question that's been largely overlooked: not how, but when should students be allowed to use AI for it to actually support learning? Janne will present findings from a study of 105 university students comparing three conditions: unrestricted AI access, no access at all, and a \"timed\" condition where students could only turn to AI after first attempting the task on their own.
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\r\nDrawing on multiple pedagogical theories to build a decision rule for when access should open up, the results show that students in the timed condition outperformed those with unrestricted access on an objective post-test, and had a more accurate sense of their own understanding, without an explicit metacognitive prompting. Compared to withholding AI entirely, timed access also seemed to reduce task errors and time spent on task.
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\r\nJoin us to learn more about the topic and engage in further discussion.
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“To emphasize (...) dubious uses of risk is perverse, a dirty way of talking about a
\r\nclean scientific subject”
\r\nMary Douglas, Risk and Blame, 36.
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\r\nAs the baseline condition of so many territories shaped by extractive industries, administrative delay, and climatic instability, risk is prevalent. Yet ecological risk—pollution, fires, floods, heatwaves, droughts—is still presented as problems to be solved rather than conditions to be inhabited. This also speaks to an outsourcing of risk through externalized consequences of spatial injustice. Banks, developers, material supply chains, normative institutions, subcontracting hierarchies —all contend with calculated risk. This edition of Pressure Points asks us to unpack what it means to live with the risk, how it is managed, commodified, quantified, invented, politicized, instrumentalized, tamed, and to think, design, cohabitate intellectually and physically with it. The assembled guests should help us think and build literacy toward developing tools for living within uncertain territories and futures.
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\r\nJess Myers
\r\nMonday, November 16, 17:00 CET
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\r\nJess Myers is an urbanist whose practice includes work as an editor, writer, podcaster and curator, and is a tenure-track Assistant Professor at Syracuse University. Previously, Myers was an assistant professor of architecture at the Rhode Island School of Design. She has worked as an archivist, translator and analyst in New York and Paris. Myers served as a co-steward of the Architecture Lobby’s New York chapter and as the series editor for SEIU’s book series, Taking Freedom. Her research takes many forms, including a variety of multimedia platforms, which she uses to explore politics and residency in urban conditions. Myers’ podcast, Here There Be Dragons focuses on the intersection of identity politics and security policy in public space through the eyes of New Yorkers, Parisians and Stockholmers. Myers’ work has been published in The Architect’s Newspaper, Log, The Funambulist Magazine, Failed Architecture, Avery Review, Dwell and l’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui. Her most recent exhibition, “A Pause Is Not A Break,“ was exhibited widely, including at the Rhode Island School of Design, the University of Iowa and Carleton University.
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\r\nRIOT (Research and Innovation on Territory) is a laboratory engaged in pedagogy and research within the Institute of Architecture (ENAC) at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology–EPFL, led by Charlotte Malterre-Barthes with Elif Erez, Flore Guichot, Jeremy Ratib, Summer Islam, Antoine Iweins, Kathy Kao, Nathalie Marj, Romain Dubetier-Grenier, Sylvie Clavel, and Saira Mohammed. Believing that the construction sector and design disciplines must pivot and wholeheartedly engage in the current social and climatic urgencies by rewiring themselves to face and repair the harm, RIOT utilizes tactics and strategies to decarbonize, decolonize, and depatriarchalize space production–by design.
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Wave functions describing bound states of electronic systems satisfy high-dimensional Schrödinger equations whose potentials exhibit Coulomb singularities at particle-collision configurations. These singularities generate cusps that limit the global regularity of the wave function in spectral Barron spaces, which are particularly relevant to the analysis of Fourier-based approximation methods and neural networks.
\r\nIn this talk, we study the effect of extracting a truncated Jastrow factor designed to capture the leading coalescence singularities while preserving the asymptotic behavior of the wave function at infinity. We show that the resulting quotient gains one full order of spectral Barron regularity: whereas the original wave function typically belongs to spaces of order (s<1), the Jastrow quotient belongs to those of order (s<2). An explicit hydrogenic example shows that the threshold (s=2) is natural.
\r\nThe proof relies on conjugating the Hamiltonian by the Jastrow factor and carrying out a global Fourier-space analysis. It combines resolvent estimates, precise control of singular coefficients, and a fixed-point argument separating low and high frequencies.
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\r\nThe electronic structure reading group brings together researchers and students interested in mathematical aspects of electronic structure problems and adjacent topics, including:\r\n