Marcel Salathé is Professor at EPFL and Co-Director of the EPFL AI Center. Until 2024, he was President of the National Research Program on COVID-19 of the Swiss National Science Foundation. He was a member of the Swiss National COVID-19 Science Taskforce, where he led the expert group “Digital Epidemiology”. He was also a member of the DP-3T group, whose work was instrumental in enabling decentralized digital contact tracing apps worldwide through Apple and Google technologies. Marcel is co-founder and organizer of one of the largest AI conferences in Europe, the Applied Machine Learning Days (AMLD).
We are witnessing an unprecedented acceleration in artificial intelligence capabilities, fundamentally changing how we work, research, create, and communicate. In this talk, we’ll explore the current state of AI development - from multimodal systems that can seamlessly work with text, images, and sound, to AI models showing increasingly sophisticated reasoning abilities - and their profound implications across society and science. We’ll look at how these AI tools are reshaping everything from scientific research to creative work, education, and public communication.