ALaRI
Advanced Learning and Research Institute
The Advanced Learning and Research Institute (ALaRI) was established in 1999 at the Università della Svizzera italiana (USI) in Lugano, to promote research and education in embedded systems and, later, it was incorporated into the Faculty of Informatics of the same university. After almost 20 years of research and premier education in embedded systems, ALaRI has merged with the Dalle Molle Institute for Artificial Intelligence (Istituto Dalle Molle di Studi sull'Intelligenza Artificiale, IDSIA) and was transformed into Graph Machine Learning Group (GMLG) concentrating mainly on research on topics such as graph machine learning, non-stationary environments, spatiotemporal data, reinforcement learning and dynamical systems.
Brief History
ALaRI was founded to fill up a research and educational gap in embedded systems (today better known as cyber-physical systems or Internet of Things) by ex-Rector of Politecnico di Milano, Prof. Luigi Dadda, Prof. Mariagiovanna Sami (Politecnico di Milano) and Prof. Giovanni de Micheli (Stanford University, currently EPFL-Lausanne) with enthusiastic support of industry, especially ST Microelectronics and Hewlett-Packard who became major supporters of the Institute. Also, companies such as Bosch, csem and imec, among others, provided support in the form of internships for ALaRI students. The main source of funding to support ALaRI’s research and infrastructure came from industry, Swiss National Foundation, European Union, and the university.
The directors of the Institute include Prof. Mariagiovanna Sami (1999-2012, part time from the Politecnico di Milano), Prof. Miroslaw Malek (2012-2017, full time from the Humboldt University in Berlin) and then from 2018 Prof. Cesare Alippi, who is now in charge of the new incarnation of ALaRI, the Graph Machine Learning Group.