The EPFL AI Center is delighted to invite you to join the exchange session about the Research Computing Platform (RCP).
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\r\nAre you building, training ML models? Are you currently facing challenges regarding IT infrastructure, and looking for reliable, collaborative, high-capacity, and affordable storage solutions to manage your research data? Are you seeking information about the computing costs?
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\r\nThe Research Computing Platform (RCP) offers campus-wide IT infrastructure geared for the research community. The offering includes a GPU infrastructure (> 400) aiming at making AI compute as accessible as possible throughout the campus.
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\r\nThis event will provide insights into the various services RCP offers to the EPFL research community.
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\r\nEvent Details:\r\n
tbc
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\r\nAgenda
\r\n12:10 – 12:30 Session
\r\n12:30 – 14:00 Standing Lunch
The ISIC Faculty retreat will be replaced by an on-site ISIC Council followed by a lunch and Faculty discussion.
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\r\nDraft Agenda
\r\n09:00 – 9:30 Welcome Coffee
\r\n09:30 – 11:00 ISIC Council
\r\n11:00 – 12:00 Faculty Discussion
\r\n12:00 – 13:30 Standing lunch
\r\n13:30 – 17:00 Faculty Discussion
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This presentation treats space and mobility as inseparable, where space is produced through movement, coordination, and pause, while mobility is always spatially formatted by routes, nodes, and boundaries. Their intersection is therefore not an overlap but a relational field in which placement and movement continuously reify one another. This perspective invites complex mixed methods approaches based on methodological mapping across different forms of evidence, which can show how movements cluster or stretch, while narrative interviews, participatory mapping, and field observation can uncover how actors interpret routes, obstacles, and anchors in everyday life. The aim is not merely conventional triangulation, but conceptual integration: Using different methods to move between patterns in systems and interpretation of experience. Mixed methods research can theorize space-mobility while also exploring how they are experienced, governed, and contested.
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\r\nManfred Max Bergman is Chair of Social Research and Methodology at the University of Basel and Director of the Social Transitions Research Group. He works on methodological innovations to the study of sustainability transitions, inequality, health, corporate responsibility, and social change, with particular expertise in mixed methods research and case study design. He has contributed to scholarship on mobility, inequality, and public space through international comparative and interdisciplinary projects, and previously served as Editor in Chief of the Journal of Mixed Methods Research. His current international engagements include service on the Swiss National Science Foundation’s Indo-Swiss Joint Scientific Board, collaboration with ICSSR in India on an innovative research methods training programme, and a visiting professorship at NUS in Singapore focused on implementation science and transdisciplinary research.
Who develops, finances, and commissions architecture—and in whose interest? This lecture series examines the often-invisible forces that shape architectural production—the clients who commission, the contractors who build, and the capital flows that determine what gets realized. While architects are trained to focus on design, the political economy of construction is largely absent from architectural education—sustaining a disciplinary insularity that obscures architecture's deep entanglement with capital, labor, and power. Yet building is fundamentally contingent: dependent on forces beyond the designer's reach, shaped by actors whose decisions constrain and enable architecture far more than design intentions. The series invites scholars and practitioners whose research illuminates these dependencies: the bureaucratization of architectural practice through corporate management systems, the client as a Mephistophelean figure key to the attainment of projects, the contractor as a decisive agent in determining how architecture is produced, and the entanglement of real estate development, finance, building, and urban form. By exposing the structural conditions of construction's political economy, we seek not to lament architecture's lack of autonomy but to work productively within its contingencies—essential groundwork for reimagining how practice might be organized otherwise.
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\r\nDavide Spina (University of Hong Kong, online) Spina's award-winning dissertation examined the Vatican-controlled real estate developer and contractor SGI (Società Generale Immobiliare), which emerged as a major force in postwar Italy's reconstruction. His research on what journalist Antonio Cederna called \"the Leviathan\" reveals how SGI coordinated 10,000 employees, bureaucratized architectural production, exploited planning regulations, and delivered schemes from residential developments to industrial infrastructure. Currently working on real estate development in 1960s-70s Hong Kong, Spina examines how developers and contractors shape architectural culture through corporate management systems.
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The MARVEL Junior Seminar series is continuing in hybrid mode, in order to maintain in-person contacts and allow off-campus attendees to follow the seminars remotely! The MARVEL Junior Seminars aim to intensify interactions between the MARVEL Junior scientists belonging to different research groups. The seminar consists of two 25-minute presentations, followed by time for discussion.
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\r\nZacharie Waysenson
\r\nLaboratoire de Physique de l’École Normale Supérieure, Sorbonne Université
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\r\nMaria Andolfatto
\r\nLaboratory for Materials Simulations, PSI