Community Meetup – AI & Impact

On Nov 18, we brought together professors and researchers from EPFL, Université de Lausanne, and IMD for our AI & Impact Community Meetup — a deep dive into how artificial intelligence is reshaping environment, health, human behavior, and governance.

In two hours, we explored research in:

🌏 AI & Environment

From AI-accelerated glacier modelling that enables faster paleo-reconstruction (Guillaume Jouvet), to bio-inspired robots for risky interventions (Kevin Holdcroft), to open and fair machine-learning tools for global environmental monitoring (Devis Tuia) — researchers highlighted how AI can help us understanding and protecting our planet.

🧬 AI & Life Sciences

We saw how open-source edge AI is powering the next generation of medical wearables, enabling earlier diagnosis and personalized treatment (David Atienza). We also learned about emerging national initiatives in precision oncology (Dorina Thanou), and how deep learning is transforming evolutionary biology through faster, more flexible phylogenetic inference (Nicolas Salamin).

🧠 AI & Humans

Speakers showed how AI can help us train interpersonal skills (Marianne Schmid Mast), support collective problem-solving (Yash Raj Shrestha), and rethink how humans and machines collaborate in organizations (Isabelle Engeler).

⚖️ Ethics & Governance of AI

We discussed participatory AI approaches that involve communities directly (Daniel Gatica-Perez), the economic and policy implications of copyright in the age of AI (Christian Peukert), and the organizational challenges of responsible AI (Öykü Işık) — from accountability to psychological safety.

A big thank you to all speakers, participants, and our partners at the EPFL AI Center and the UNIL Applied AI Lab.