Fall Term 2025

We are delighted to welcome a number of distinguished computer scientists to the upcoming IfI colloquium in the Fall Term HS 2025. We are looking forward to inspiring encounters with our guests, presenting topics from different areas of computer science.

The IfI colloquium is a free public event for researchers, students and the interested public and does not require registration. 

The IfI colloquium is held in English and takes place from 17:15 to 18:30 in room 2.A.01 at the Department of Informatics (IfI), Binzmühlestrasse 14, 8050 Zürich. 

All the talks are held onsite.

If you have further questions please contact Karin Sigg.

Flyer to download (PDF, 216 KB)

Newsletter IfI Colloquium
We announce our IfI Colloquium talk series every semester via email. If you want to subscribe to this mailing list please send an email to Karin Sigg.

23.10.2025 – Cocaine and Conway's Law: what young software engineers need to learn and how we should teach it

Speaker:  Dr. Greg Wilson

Host: Prof. Dr. Alberto Bacchelli

Abstract

Most young programmers have only ever been exposed to one worldview: the toxic strain of neoliberal capitalism favored by venture capitalists and their gushing fans in the tech media. As a result, they don't have the intellectual tools to understand how tech contributes to climate change, widening inequality, the resurgence of racist nationalism, and a host of other problems.

Lots of books offer cogent answers to these questions, but very few programmers are going to read nine thousand pages on a whim. However, they might sit through a one-semester course that introduces a few fundamental ideas, including why "flat" organizations make power imbalances worse rather than better, why discrimination persists despite its economic inefficiency, how regulatory capture works, and what can we learn about big tech by studying drug cartels.

Bio

Greg Wilson is a programmer, author, and educator based in Toronto. He co-founded and was the first Executive Director of Software Carpentry, which has taught basic software skills to tens of thousands of researchers worldwide, and has authored or edited over a dozen books, including "Beautiful Code", "The Architecture of Open Source Applications", and most recently "Software Design by Example". Greg is a Fellow of the Python Software Foundation and a recipient of ACM SIGSOFT's Influential Educator of the Year award, and currently works as a software engineering manager at Plotly.

30.10.2025 – Towards Natural Human-Drone Interaction

Speaker:  Prof. Dr. Jessica Cauchard

Host: Prof. Dr. Gerhard Schwabe

Abstract

The increasing use of small-size drones is both exciting and frightening. The success and acceptability of these automated devices will depend on how well they will be able to communicate with users and passersby alike. How will people be able to make sense of a drone’s intentions and abilities? How will drones respond to people in complex situations?  In this lecture, I will present how we can leverage techniques at the intersection between technology and design to build novel interaction techniques for collocated human-drone interaction. I will, in particular, discuss several methodologies that were used successfully to understand user’s expectations and present how these new flying technologies re-invent our understanding of ubiquitous and mobile computing.

Bio

Jessica R. Cauchard is a full professor for Embodied Intelligent Interaction at TU Wien, Austria. Her research is rooted in the fields of Human-Computer and Human-Robot Interaction with a focus on novel interaction techniques and ubiquitous computing. Previously, she was a faculty member in the department of Industrial Engineering and Management at Ben Gurion University of the Negev, where she founded and headed the Magic Lab; and in the department of Computer Science at Reichman University, Israel. Prof. Cauchard received her PhD in Computer Science at the University of Bristol, UK in 2013 and worked as a postdoctoral scholar at Cornell Tech and Stanford University.

27.11.2025 – Learning to Handle Autonomous Vehicles at the Limits

Speaker:  Prof. Dr. Johannes Betz

Host: Prof.  Dr. Davide Scaramuzza

Abstract

This talk presents methods for developing autonomous driving systems that operate at the physical limits of vehicle dynamics. The focus lies on the design of a complete software stack for high-speed, high-precision driving, including perception, planning, and control modules. Emphasis is placed on learning-based control strategies that enable robust decision-making under uncertainty and rapidly changing conditions. Case studies from autonomous racing competitions such as the Indy Autonomous Challenge and Abu Dhabi Racing League illustrate how these approaches push vehicles to their performance boundaries while ensuring safety and reliability.

Bio

Johannes studied automotive engineering at Coburg University of Applied Sciences (B. Eng., 2013) and at the University of Bayreuth (M. Sc., 2013) with a focus on electric drive systems and software development. From 2013 to 2018, Johannes was a research assistant at the Technical University of Munich where he received his Dr.-Ing. degree in 2019. He founded the TUM Autonomous Motorsport Team, which successfully participated in the autonomous racing series Roborace, Indy Autonomous Challenge and the Abu Dhabi Autonomous Racing League. From 2020 to 2022, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Pennsylvania, USA. In 2023, he was appointed as Rudolf Mößbauer Professor at the Technical University of Munich, where he holds the Autonomous Vehicle Systems Professorship as part of the Department of Mobility Systems.

04.12.2025 – A Robotic Teleoperation Framework Using Digital Twins

Speaker:  Dr. Venkata Prabhakar

Host: Prof.  Dr. Burkhard Stiller

Abstract

Remote Robotic surgery imposes a significant cognitive burden on the surgeon due to latency between entities.  Real-time teleoperation of robots requires strict latency bounds for control and feedback. We propose a dual digital twin (DT) framework and explain the simulation environment and teleoperation framework.  The doctor visually controls a locally available DT of the patient side and thus experiences minimum latency. The second digital twin serves two purposes. Firstly, it provides a layer of safety for operator-related mishaps, and secondly, it takes the role of a semantic encoder and thus reduces the network traffic by over 25x.  We show that teleoperation accuracy and user experience are enhanced with our approach. Experimental results using the NASA-TLX metric show that the quality of surgery is vastly improved with DT, perhaps due to reduced cognitive burden.

Bio

Dr. T. Venkata Prabhakar is a Chief Research Scientist at the Indian Institute of Science IISc, Bengaluru, India. He works in Networked Embedded Systems, focusing on electronic system design, energy harvesting systems, and power management algorithms. His group builds embedded electronic systems for application areas such as Space IOT, Urban Air Mobility, Industrial, and Tactile IoT.

He has over 125 publications in international journals and conferences and several best-paper awards. The latest best paper award, titled "EdgeP4: In-Network Edge Intelligence for a Tactile Cyber-Physical System Testbed Across Cities", was in IEEE INFOCOMM's 2024 CNERT. He is engaged with about 100 MSMEs and facilitates funding and technical advice under the MSME Centre of Excellence. Dr. Prabhakar holds an MSc in Physic, an MSc in Engineering, and a Ph.D. degree.

11.12.2025 – Visual Analytics of Industrial Data Sets

Speaker:  Prof. Dr. Tobias Schreck

Host: Prof.  Dr. Jürgen Bernard

Abstract

Visual Analytics approaches integrate interactive data visualization with automated data analysis, to support users in understanding large data sets. Visual Analytics approaches to data have been developed and evaluated in many different application domains, supporting tasks in data exploration, pattern discovery, confirmatory analysis, and presentation tasks. An important application domain are industrial production processes. Due to digitalization efforts, large amounts of potentially very valuable data arise from production and testing processes. However, large data volumes, high-frequent measurements, and multidimensional and multimodal data, and often lack of labelled data, make its analysis a challenge. We present approaches from our work in visual analysis of industrial data sets. We discuss approaches for exploration of process and simulation data, for anomaly detection in time series and signal data, and interactive labeling and rule generation in testing data. We discuss challenges and opportunities in industrial data analysis, including recent approaches in user guidance, and natural language interaction with visual analytics systems.

Bio

Tobias Schreck is a Professor with the Institute of Visual Computing (formerly Institute of Computer Graphics and Knowledge Visualization) at Graz University of Technology, where he leads a research group on Visual Analytics. Research questions are how large collections of data, e.g., high-dimensional, spatio-temporal, or 3D object data, can be visualized and interactively explored for data understanding and decision making. Application areas include visual analysis of engineering and industrial data, multimodal biomedical data, health information data, and cultural heritage 3D object data.
Tobias Schreck is a principal investigator in the Horizon Europe HEREDITARY project [https://hereditary-project.eu/] (2024-2027), the FFG Lead Project PRESENT (2023-2026) [https://www.tugraz.at/institute/cgv/research/projects/present], coordinator of the FWF research group A+CHIS (2021-2026) [https://apchis.cgv.tugraz.at/], and a key researcher in the Pro2Future competence center [https://www.pro2future.at/start-en/]. He has served as papers co-chair for the IEEE Conference on Visual Analytics Science and Technology (now IEEE VIS) in 2017 and 2018, and as associate editor for IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics in 2018-2021.
 

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