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Leveraging the world's most AI-capable supercomputer

Alps by the National Supercomputing Center (CSCS) is the world's first national research infrastructure with over 10'000 GPUs of the new NVIDIA Grace Hopper superchip.

infrastructure
Democratizing large-scale AI for the benefit of society: Open calls for disruptive ideas

In addition to its core research activities as outlined below, the Swiss AI Initiative is distributing 10-20 million GPU hours in 2025 for disruptive research projects through open calls. We look for research projects that aim to contribute to advances in AI fundamentals or impactful applications of AI. Researchers outside of Switzerland are encouraged to apply if they team up with at least one of our PIs and aim to create novel open science artifacts that benefit the Swiss, European or global ecosystem and societal context.

 

Proposal deadlines & more information

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Background

The Swiss AI Initiative was started in December 2023 and seeded with an initial investment of over 10'000'000 GPU hours. ETH Zurich and EPFL have created in October 2024 the Swiss National AI Institute (SNAI) to provide a long-term and national perspective on AI-based research, education and innovation. SNAI accelerates the momentum of the Swiss AI Initiative and spearheads research on large-scale AI enabled by Alps. The initiative is further backed by 20 million CHF by ETH Domain, further compute commitments, and third party funding (industry partnerships, donations, etc).

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The Swiss AI Initiative is operated by SNAI and the largest open science/open source effort for AI foundation models worldwide.​ By leveraging its integration with the ETH AI Center and the EPFL AI Center, the initiative benefits from the critical mass of both institutions as well as the expertise of a total of over 800 researchers (incl. 70 AI-focused professors) from over 10 academic institutions across Switzerland.

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The scientific leads are responsible for driving progress in their area together with the participating research groups. In total, there are five vertical activities for novel, domain-specific foundation models, and five horizontal activities to advance the foundations of LLMs and large-scale AI models towards trustworthiness and efficiency.

research

Verticals

Foundation model for sciences

Prof. Brbic, Prof. Schwaller,
Prof. Marinkovic

Foundation model for health

Prof. Rätsch, Prof. Salathé,
Prof. Fellay

Foundation model for education

Prof. Käser, Prof. Sachan

Foundation model for sustainability / climate

Prof. Mishra, Prof. Schemm, Prof. Hoefler,
Prof. Salzmann

Foundation model for ego-centric vision & robotics

Prof. Alahi, Prof. Pollefeys,
Prof. Katzschmann

Horizontals

Fundamentals of foundation models

Prof. Yang, Prof. He,
Prof. Zdeborova, Prof. Flammarion

Human-AI alignment

Prof. Ash, Prof. Gulcehre

LLM security, red teaming & privacy

Prof. Troncoso, Prof. Tramèr​

Large-scale multi-modal models

Prof. Cotterell, Prof. Zamir

Tools & infrastructure for scaling

Prof. Klimovic, Prof. Falsafi

Advanced LLMs

Prof. Bosselut, Prof. Jaggi,
Dr. Schlag

steering committee

Research Committee
& Coordination

The Research Committee is responsible for overseeing the Swiss AI Initiative and decides on appointments of scientific leads for the activity areas, resources, and strategic direction. ETH Zurich and EPFL have both equal voting power in this committee.

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Prof. Andreas Krause

ETH AI Center

Steering Committee

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Prof. Martin Jaggi

EPFL

Steering Committee

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Dr. Martin Rajman

EPFL

Coordination deputy

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Prof. Ana Klimovic

ETH AI Center

Steering Committee

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Dr. Joost VandeVondele

CSCS

StC Observer

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Prof. Antoine Bosselut

EPFL

Steering Committee

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PD Dr. Alexander Ilic

ETH AI Center

Coordination lead

researchers

Swiss AI Assembly

The Swiss AI initiative already involves over 70 professors from ETH Zurich, EPFL, Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS), Haute Ecole Spécialisée de Suisse occidentale (HES-SO), Idiap Research Institute, Istituto Dalle Molle di studi sull'intelligenza artificiale (IDSIA USI-SUPSI), The Swiss Data Science Center (SDSC), Universitätsspital Zürich (USZ), University of Fribourg, University of Geneva , University of Bern, University of Zurich, and ZHAW.

​ETH Zurich

  • PD Dr. Alexander Ilic, ETH AI Center

  • Prof. Ana Klimovic, ETH AI Center

  • Prof. Andreas Krause, ETH AI Center

  • Prof. Benjamin Grewe, ETH AI Center

  • Prof. Catherine Jutzeler, ETH Zurich

  • Prof. Eleni Chatzi, ETH AI Center

  • Prof. Elliott Ash, ETH AI Center

  • Prof. Fanny Yang, ETH AI Center

  • Prof. Florian Tramèr, ETH AI Center

  • Prof. Gunnar Rätsch, ETH AI Center

  • Dr. Imanol Schlag, ETH AI Center

  • Prof. Julia Vogt, ETH AI Center

  • Prof. Konrad Schindler, ETH AI Center

  • Prof. Valentina Boeva, ETH AI Center

  • Prof. Marc Pollefeys, ETH AI Center

  • Prof. Marina Krstic Marinkovic, ETH AI Center

  • Prof. Martin Vechev, ETH AI Center

  • Prof. Michael Moor, ETH AI Center

  • Prof. Menna El-Assady, ETH AI Center

  • Prof. Mrinmaya Sachan, ETH AI Center

  • Prof. Niao He, ETH AI Center

  • Prof. Robert Katzschmann, ETH AI Center

  • Prof. Ryan Cotterell, ETH AI Center

  • Prof. Sebastian Schemm, ETH AI Center

  • Prof. Siddhartha Mishra, ETH AI Center

  • Prof. Siyu Tang, ETH AI Center

  • Prof. Thomas Hofmann, ETH AI Center

  • Prof. Torsten Hoefler, ETH AI Center

  • Prof. Gisbert Schneider, ETH AI Center

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University of Zurich

  • Prof. Abraham Bernstein, UZH

  • Prof. Davide Scaramuzza, UZH & ETH AI Center

  • Prof. Michael Krauthammer, UZH & ETH AI Center

  • Prof. Rico Sennrich, UZH

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Idiap Research Institute

  • Prof. Andrea Cavallaro, IDIAP

  • Prof. James Henderson, IDIAP

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University of Fribourg

  • Prof. Philippe Cudre-Mauroux, UFribourg

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University of Basel

  • Prof. Aurelien Lucchi, UniBas

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University of Bern

  • Prof. Paolo Favaro, Uni Bern

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ZHAW

  • Dr. Alisa Rupenyan, ZHAW

  • Prof. Kurt Stockinger, ZHAW

  • Prof. Mark Cieliebak, ZHAW

  • Prof. Thilo Stadelmann, ZHAW

​EPFL

  • Prof. Alexander Mathis, EPFL

  • Prof. Alexandre Alahi, EPFL

  • Prof. Amir Zamir, EPFL

  • Prof. Anne-Florence Bitbol, EPFL

  • Prof. Antoine Bosselut, EPFL

  • Prof. Babak Falsafi, EPFL

  • Prof. Bruno Correia, EPFL

  • Prof. Caglar Gulcehre, EPFL

  • Prof. Carmela Troncoso, EPFL

  • Prof. Charlotte Bunne, EPFL

  • Prof. David Atienza, EPFL

  • Prof. Devis Tuia, EPFL

  • Prof. Emmanuel Abbe, EPFL

  • Prof. Florent Krzakala, EPFL

  • Prof. Jacques Fellay, EPFL

  • Prof. Mackenzie Mathis, EPFL

  • Prof. Marcel Salathé, EPFL

  • Prof. Maria Brbic, EPFL

  • Prof. Martin Jaggi, EPFL

  • Prof. Mary-Anne Hartley, EPFL

  • Prof. Martin Schrimpf, EPFL

  • Prof. Nicolas Flammarion, EPFL

  • Prof. Pascal Frossard, EPFL

  • Prof. Philippe Schwaller, EPFL

  • Prof. Robert West, EPFL

  • Prof. Sabine Süsstrunk, EPFL

  • Prof. Sanidhya Kashyap, EPFL

  • Prof. Tanja Käser, EPFL

  • Prof. Volkan Cevher, EPFL

  • Prof. Josie Hughes, EPFL

  • Prof. Lenka Zdeborova, EPFL

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Istituto Dalle Molle di studi sull'intelligenza artificiale (IDSIA USI-SUPSI)

  • Prof. Andrea Emilio Rizzoli, SUPSI

  • Prof. Fabio Crestani, USI

  • Prof. Fabio Rinaldi, SUPSI

  • Prof. Marco Zaffalon, SUPSI

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Haute Ecole Spécialisée de Suisse occidentale (HES-SO)

  • Dr. Andrei Kucharavy, HES-SO

  • Prof. Dimitri Percia David, HES-SO

  • Prof. Pamela Delgado, HES-SO

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University of Geneva

  • Prof. Francois Fleuret, UniGe

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Swiss AI Assembly

©2024 by ETH AI Center & EPFL AI Center

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