Who are we?

Institutional Data and Analytics

Our Mission

We operate at the union between analytics and institutional strategy. Our mandate is to transform EPFL’s vast data ecosystem into actionable intelligence for the Presidency and the Board.

We go beyond reporting. We act as strategic advisors, leveraging our network and programmatic tools to navigate the complex landscape of Swiss and global higher education.

Core Expertise

Strategy and Impact Analytics

We structure our activities around four main domains:

• Advisory to the Presidency and the Board: Ad-hoc impact, strategic and predictive analyses for high-level decision-making.
• Data Stories: Institutional narratives on specific themes (economic impact, social diversity, working conditions, etc.) based on facts.
• Global Benchmarking: Analysis of rankings and publication of specialized comparative reports against top-tier technical universities.
• Sustainability: In close collaboration with our colleagues from EPFL sustainability, we quantify the School’s environmental footprint and other related analyses.

Academic Analytics

• Education: Analyzing all relevant operational and strategic aspects of an international campus of more than 15’000 students (teaching loads, course overlap, diversity, success rates, student mobility flows, study plans, etc.).
• Research: Advanced bibliometrics, funding sources by research domain, grant recommendations, awards and scientific equipment indicators.
• Tech Transfer: Monitoring technology dissemination pipelines and industry collaboration.

Data Governance and Data Coordination

• Data Quality processes: We allow EPFL labs to export and validate their annual academic data through the Annual Academic Report (AAR) cycle (login).

• Stewardship Initiative: We lead the School’s data governance framework, empowering Data Stewards to ensure quality at the source of information. All processes, standards and training can be found on our intranet pages (login).

• National Coordination and Alignment: We align EPFL with broader standards (Federal Chancellery, Swiss Federal Statistical Office), produce official reporting to the ETH Board and contribute to the Swiss Open Government Data (OGD) strategy.

While our traditional analytics focus on the what (numbers), we also focus on the why (meaning). We are pioneering the integration of AI into institutional data to turn unstructured data (text, networks, surveys) into actionable logic. Recent work includes semantic analyses of EPFL artefacts, AI recommendation grants newsletters, research landscape mapping and partnership analytics based on Open Access databases. In collaboration with the Center for Digital Education (CEDE), we also sponsor and support EPFL Graph, a tool that offers a holistic view of EPFL’s activities through a graph network of interconnected academic data.

Ecosystem & Networks

We thrive within EPFL’s rich ecosystem and closely collaborate with the Business Intelligence (DSI-BI) unit, the Research Computing Platform (VPA-RCP), and the vast majority of business units of the School. We are proud founders and leaders of:

• SOAD: The Swiss Open Academic Data Network is the community for Swiss researchers and practitioners around open academic data.
• BenchTech: An international network for technical university sharing of best practices in the field of Institutional Research and Data Policy Making.
• Data Coffees: The EPFL internal network of data scientists, data analysts and data engineers of our central services.

Membership and Advisory Activities

Member of the advisory board of OpenAlex, the Swiss Statistics Network (Fedestat) and the Conference of European Schools for Advanced Engineering Education and Research (CESAER).

 

Our mandate focuses on Institutional Data. For inquiries regarding Research Data Management (RDM), please contact [email protected].