“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\nLiam Ross
\r\nTuesday, November 3, 17:00 CET
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\r\nLiam Ross is an architect and senior lecturer in Architectural Design at the University of Edinburgh, with a focus on building standardisation as a mode of architectural design, and in particular on fire-safety regulation. He also examines how those standards produce surprising side-effects as they are reinterpreted in practice. His book Pyrotechnic Cities: Architecture, Fire-Safety and Standardisation was published by Routledge in 2022, and describes the way that architectural design is an instrument of political agency.
\r\nHis work has been exhibited and published widely, including in Architectural Research Quarterly (arq), Arch+, and journalistic outlets such as Blueprint, Prospect, and Volume.
\r\nRoss has experience of practice in the UK and US, including a period of 5 years with Malcolm Fraser Architects, and maintains a relationship with professional practice as co-founder of ESALA Projects, a consultancy offering pro-bono and for-fee design services to public and third-sector clients. His most recent work, published in January 2026 in Architectural Research Quarterly, includes a co-authored article with Jon Goodbun entitled ‘Design and the extended building site: Ecologies of production and the production of ecologies’, which reframes the building site as an 'extended' socioecological system reaching across the global supply chains, material extraction, and labour that construction depends on, arguing that building is an ecological and political process rather than a purely material one.
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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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Astrocytes are the predominant glial cells in the mammalian central nervous system (CNS) and play essential roles in maintaining neural circuit activity and tissue homeostasis. In response to CNS insult, including traumatic injury or implantation of a medical device, astrocytes undergo a conserved, temporally regulated reprogramming that reshapes their prioritized functions to protect adjacent neural tissue. The nature and extent of astrocyte reprogramming critically influences outcomes after CNS insult. For example, regeneration after traumatic CNS injury in adult mammals is limited by local responding astrocytes lacking sufficient self-renewal capacity. By contrast, the CNS of neonate (newborn) mammals possesses exceptional parenchymal repair capacity owing to immature astrocytes with elevated proliferative and migratory potential. In the context of an implanted medical device, the spatial extent of astrocyte reprogramming and how impacted astrocytes respond to any further device micromotion, latent infection, or other persistent device-derived stimuli, dictates device performance and longevity. Engineering astrocyte responses to promote targeted functional gains while preserving key capabilities of healthy neural tissue astrocytes will be critical to enabling effective neural regeneration therapies and improving long-term performance of implanted devices. In this talk, I will outline our emerging understanding of how adult astrocytes adaptively reprogram in response to CNS injury and implanted foreign bodies, drawing insights from innovative astrocyte-specific transcriptomic bioassays. I will also provide an overview of biomaterial and cell-grafting strategies that we are exploring to direct astrocyte responses in preclinical models of stroke, spinal cord injury, and foreign body responses.
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\r\nBio:
\r\nDr. Timothy O’Shea, PhD is an Assistant Professor in the Biomedical Engineering department at Boston University (BU). Tim grew up in Brisbane, Australia and completed a Bachelor of Medical Engineering (First Class Honours) and a Masters in Engineering Management at Queensland University of Technology (QUT) before moving to the US for graduate school. He completed his PhD study in Medical Engineering and Medical Physics within the collaborative Health Sciences and Technology program of the Harvard Medical School and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where we conducted PhD thesis research with Institute Professor Robert Langer. As a Postdoctoral Fellow in Neurobiology at UCLA, he worked with Professors Michael Sofroniew (Neurobiology) and Timothy Deming (Bioengineering) developing and testing novel bioengineering tools to study biological mechanisms involved in CNS injury and repair as well as the CNS foreign body response to implants. Since Fall 2020 he has been leading the Glia Engineering Lab at BU where he has received numerous awards including the Maximizing Investigators' Research Award (MIRA) from NIH and grants from several spinal cord injury research foundations such as Craig H Neilsen, Paralyzed Veterans of America, Bryon Reisch, and Wings for Life.
“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.
\r\n
\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\nSonia Seneviratne
\r\nMonday, October 26, 17:00 CET
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\r\nSonia Seneviratne is a Full Professor in Land-Climate Dynamics at ETH Zurich, with a focus on climate science and environmental physics. She conducts research on climate extremes such as droughts, land-climate processes, and human-induced climate change, based on climate modelling and data analyses. Listed among the Highly Cited Researchers of Web of Science (Clarivate) since 2014, she was a Coordinating Lead Author and Lead Author on several reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), including the Special Report on Extreme Events, the Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5°C, and the Sixth Assessment Report in 2021. Seneviratne has received the Macelwane Medal of the American Geophysical Union in 2013 and the Hans-Oeschger Medal of the European Geosciences Union. Since July 2023, she serves as IPCC Working Group I Vice-Chair for the seventh assessment cycle (2023–2030). Her most recent contribution, published in June 2026, is the release of MESMER v1.0.0, an open-source climate model emulator she helped develop as part of her research group. It reproduces the spatial climate patterns of complex Earth System Models, including temperature and several climate-extreme indicators, making detailed climate information accessible to the wider research community.
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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
“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.
\r\n
\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.
\r\n
\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.
\r\n
Generative 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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