Chair of Operations, Economics & Strategy

Self-Learning Part Feeder Wins “AI-Powered Innovation” Prize

Published:23.02.26 — Since 2019, every year the graduate course “Innovation and Entrepreneurship in Engineering” (MGT-555) brings together students from across EPFL to develop product-innovation projects with industry partners. Led by Prof. Véronique Michaud and Prof. Thomas A. Weber, the Autumn 2025 edition focused on “AI-Powered Innovation.” Seven multidisciplinary teams delivered working demonstrators and business cases, with explicit attention to sustainability and risk. The top prize (the 2025 IEE Prize) was awarded to Team 5 for “GRASP,” a self-learning robotic part-feeding add-on for flexible manufacturing, developed with HUMARD Automation. The runner-up was Team 1 for “OptiFlow,” an AI-powered shelf-layout and customer-flow optimization concept developed with Decathlon.

A New Measure for Decision-Making under Uncertainty

Published:13.11.25 — Decision-makers in business, finance, and policy frequently face situations where the best course of action is unclear—not because outcomes are risky in a probabilistic sense, but because essential information is missing. A new study by Prof. Thomas A. Weber (Chair of Operations, Economics and Strategy, EPFL) introduces a general metric to quantify such uncertainty based on observed decisions and outcomes. The paper, titled “A Measure of Decision-Based Payoff Uncertainty,” was presented at the 6th International Conference on Problems of Cybernetics and Informatics (PCI) and published by IEEE.

Professor Weber Wins the 2025 ACIIS Best Paper Award

Published:31.10.25 — At the 2025 IEEE 7th International Conference on Applied Computational Intelligence in Information Systems (ACIIS), held October 20–22 at Universiti Teknologi Brunei in Brunei Darussalam, Prof. Weber received the Best Paper Award for his work on a robust aggregate scoring system for evaluating digital services. The winning paper, “Relatively Robust QoS and QoE Score Aggregation,” is forthcoming on IEEE Xplore as part of the conference proceedings.