Universita della Svizzera Italiana

Overview

Universita della Svizzera Italiana

Universita della Svizzera Italiana (USI, University of Italian Switzerland, or the University of Lugano) is a public research university in Lugano, Ticino, Switzerland. It was founded in 1995 and is the only Swiss university whose official medium of instruction is Italian, with numerous courses given in English. The university is known for its programs in biomedicine, informatics, health studies, computational science, and architecture.

Universita della Svizzera Italiana Key Statistics

The university is organized in five faculties spread across its three campuses. These faculties are the Faculty of Biomedical Sciences, Faculty of Informatics, Faculty of Economics, Faculty of Communication, Culture, and Society, and Faculty of Architecture. Its three campuses are the Lugano campus, the Mendrisio campus, and the Bellinzona campus.

USI offers undergraduate programs in five disciplines, including economics and communication sciences, and Italian language, literature, and civilization. It also offers 23 postgraduate programs and various doctoral programs.

Universita della Svizzera Italiana's student population is approximately 2,815, with 1,342 undergraduates, 1,121 postgraduates, and 272 doctoral candidates. It employs around 869 academic staff and 190 administrative staff.

The other Universita della Svizzera Italiana key statistics include its notable alumni that include architect Mario Botta, economist Mauro Baranzini, philosopher Tim Crane, and computer expert Luigi Dadda. The university is also an accredited UNESCO chair in ICT for developing and promoting sustainable tourism in the country’s various World Heritage Sites.

Universita della Svizzera Italiana Research

USI undertakes numerous national and international research projects via an extensive network of international partners. The university receives around 21 million Swiss francs on average in annual funding from national and regional organizations such as the Swiss National Science Foundation and the European Research Council.

Its top fields of research are computer science, biology, and medicine. Universita della Svizzera Italiana research outputs have been published in prestigious journals like the Social Science Research Network, Research Papers in Economics, and arXiv: Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition. Its researchers have attended major scholarly conferences such as the International Conference on Software Engineering, the Web Conference, and the National Conference on Artificial Intelligence.

The most cited Universita della Svizzera Italiana research publication is Schmidhuber’s (2015) “Deep learning in neural networks.” This was published in the Neural Networks and has been cited 16,726 times.

The university’s second most cited publication is Greff et al.’s (2017) “LSTM: A search space odyssey,” which appeared in the IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and has received 3,429 citations.

Moreover, the university’s third most cited publication is Giannozzi et al.’s (2017) “Advanced capabilities for materials modelling with Quantum ESPRESSO,” which was featured in the Journal of Physics: Condensed Matter and has received 2,387 citations.

USI has numerous research centers, institutes, laboratories, and other facilities. These include the Institute of Oncology Research, Institute for Research in Biomedicine, Institute of Computational Science, Dalle Molle Institute for Artificial Intelligence Research, and the European School for Advanced Studies in Ophthalmology. It is also home to the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre, the site of the fastest, high-performance computers in the country.