The Doctoral School is glad to invite all first-year PhD candidates to join the annual PhD Welcome Event!
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\r\nWhat to expect:
\r\n- Meet the EPFL doctoral community, the administrators of the doctoral school and programs, the PhD associations
\r\n- Discover the many EPFL services dedicated to supporting and counseling students and researchers
\r\n- Get useful insights about your doctoral journey at EPFL, and the resources available to help you
\r\n- Enjoy free food & drinks, and connect with PhD candidates from all our programs and campuses!
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\r\nWho is it for?
\r\n- The event is open to EPFL PhD candidates who enrolled after November 2025. Registration is required.
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\r\nPhD candidates working outside Lausanne are especially encouraged to join. This event is a golden opportunity to discover the Lausanne campus and meet your peers! You may request travel support: please contact us via the registration form.
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\r\nDirect link to the registration form
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\r\nWe look forward to meeting you on November 5th!
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\r\nThe Doctoral School Administration Team (EDOC)
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Thesis Director: Prof. D. Constam,
\r\nMolecular Life Sciences doctoral program
\r\nThesis Nr. 11220
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\r\nTo take part in the public defense, please contact directly the speaker
This 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
As the global AI landscape consolidates around US and Chinese dominance, every nation outside this duopoly faces an urgent question: how can countries retain meaningful control over a technology increasingly expected to shape their economic competitiveness, national security, and societal resilience? From the viability of sovereign cloud architectures and open-weight foundation models to the governance mechanisms needed to ensure AI systems reflect Swiss values and legal frameworks, this conference brings together industry leaders, researchers, legal experts, policymakers, and civil society actors to assess the concrete levers of AI sovereignty and work toward actionable recommendations for a Swiss sovereign AI strategy.
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