EPFL is established among the world’s leading institutions. EPFL participates in the project through the Data-Intensive Applications and Systems (DIAS) lab. DIAS conducts research that lies in the broad area of database systems and applications. The main projects of the lab aim at (a) supporting scientific applications through automating physical database design for very large heterogeneous datasets, as well as inventing access methods for specialized data structures and models (i.e., data virtualization), and (b) inventing innovative technology to strengthen the interaction between the database software and the underlying hardware and I/O devices. The DIAS lab work is regularly featured in top computing conferences worldwide, such as ACM SIGMOD, VLDB, ASPLOS, ISCA, IEEE ICDE and EDBT.