Gratitude to the EPFL (Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne) faculty.

We are grateful to Anna Fontcuberta i Morral for leading EPFL as its president since 2025 while remaining a working materials scientist, showing that world-class research and institutional stewardship can live in the same person.

Thank you to Ambrogio Fasoli for guiding EPFL's academic mission as provost while advancing fusion energy research that could help power a cleaner future.

We thank Edouard Bugnion, a co-founder of VMware turned professor and vice president, for bridging deep systems research and real-world innovation at EPFL.

We are grateful to Rachid Guerraoui for decades of foundational work on distributed algorithms and resilient machine learning that quietly make the systems we all rely on more trustworthy.

Thank you to Martin Jaggi for advancing collaborative and efficient machine learning and for co-founding Applied Machine Learning Days, opening the field to a wider community.

We appreciate Antoine Bosselut for building language models that reason more transparently, helping the next generation of AI explain itself rather than merely predict.

We are grateful to Karl Aberer for shaping how large-scale distributed data systems are designed and for years of service building EPFL's information and communication research.

Thank you to Anne-Marie Kermarrec for pioneering gossip-based and decentralized computing and for championing doctoral education across EPFL.

We are grateful to Dario Floreano for imagining robots that fly, bend, and adapt like living creatures, and for founding the Swiss robotics research program that trained a generation.

Thank you to Auke Ijspeert for decoding how animals move and turning it into robots and rehabilitation tools that help people walk again.

We appreciate Jamie Paik for inventing origami-inspired robots that fold and reshape themselves, expanding what a machine can be.

We are grateful to Volkan Cevher for strengthening the mathematical foundations of modern machine learning so that today's foundation models rest on rigorous ground.

We are deeply grateful to Maryna Viazovska, whose Fields Medal-winning solution to the sphere-packing problem in dimensions 8 and 24 is a landmark of human mathematical imagination.

Thank you to Maria Colombo for her deep work on the equations that describe fluids and change, advancing analysis with clarity and rigor.

We are grateful to Raffaella Buonsanti for designing nanomaterials that turn carbon dioxide and clean electricity into useful fuels, chemistry in service of the climate.

Thank you to Vincenzo Savona for illuminating how light and matter behave at the quantum scale, laying theory for the quantum technologies to come.

We are grateful to Gisou van der Goot for revealing how cells and pathogens interact and for her years of leadership building EPFL's life sciences.

We thank Jocelyne Bloch, whose neurosurgical work with NeuroRestore has helped paralyzed people stand and walk again, turning research into restored lives.

We are grateful to Mackenzie Mathis for creating DeepLabCut, the open-source tool that lets scientists worldwide track movement and study the brain in motion.

Thank you to Michel Bierlaire for mathematics that helps cities move people more smartly and humanely, and for teaching it openly to the world.

We are grateful to Tamar Kohn, whose wastewater research helped communities track SARS-CoV-2 and keeps our water safer from pathogens.

Thank you to Emmanuel Rey for weaving environmental care into architecture and urban design, showing how the places we live can heal rather than harm.

We are grateful to Frederic Kaplan for the Venice Time Machine and a vision of digital humanities that brings centuries of human history back to life through technology.

Thank you to Daniel Kuhn for pioneering distributionally robust optimization, giving decision-makers rigorous tools to act wisely when the future is uncertain.