Università della Svizzera italiana
Encyclopedia
Università della Svizzera italiana (USI, literally University of Italian Switzerland) is a public
university
located in Lugano
, Switzerland, founded in 1996. USI has four faculties (schools), and follows the European standard of three-year undergraduate studies and two-year master's (in Italian or English).
The main building consists of four floors containing: Communications and Economics offices (1-3), the Executive Centre, four computer labs (1), classrooms (1-3), the ALaRI institute (4), dining-center (2)(Q1-2007), and third-floor auditorium (3)(Q3-2007). The library is four floors tall: study tables line the interior, and a moderate collection of books and periodicals extend to the periphery; books can be requested from other libraries (e.g. ETH Zurich
). The LAB has six floors: three floors dedicated as partitioned study & research space for Economics students; its name originates from its purpose as ETH Zurich
's Chemical & Applied Biosciences Department.
The Aule, informally known as "Palazzo Rosso" (Red Building), hosts six classrooms on its three floors, and is commonly used by Economics and Communications faculties. The modern-looking concrete & metal Informatics
building finished in 2007 contains classrooms (1), offices and study areas reserved for CS
students and mentors (2-3). The university parking lot is hosted underneath Informatics and Aule.
Aula Magna is a university's convention hall and capable of seating over 1,000 people; it is used to host university conferences, speeches, and classical music concerts; and solely the entrance to the hall is visible above ground. South of the main building, the Central Services offices houses the presidency and core services of the university, and the Institutes provide offices for PhD students, assistants, and other research students.
and wired Internet access connects students to the Swiss SWITCH
network.
There is an apartment building owned by the school in town (Casa dell' Accademia). Other apartments are obtained through local agencies.
. The campus is also shared with a theology department which is not affiliated with the university.
. With forty lecturers and twenty-five design studios (including the famous Mario Botta
, Massimo Carmassi
, Valerio Olgiati
), the Accademia
in Mendrisio
trains 712 students for 3-year bachelor, and 2-year masters degree (2011).
Rico Maggi. 1029 students (2011). Topics: Banking, Finance
, Management
, Economics and International Policies (it); Financial Communication, Marketing
; in English and Italian.
Lorenzo Cantoni. 865 students (2011). Topics: Media, new media and journalism, Marketing
, Corporate Communication, Public communication, Healthcare communication, Information and communication technologies
, Education
and Tourism
, mainly in Italian and English.
was Mehdi Jazayeri
, a senior member and fellow of the IEEE and author of several books. Mauro Pezzè became dean in 2010.
First year students cover mathematical topics, computer architecture, networking, and fundamental concepts of programming. A further course persists throughout the 3 year undergraduate curriculum. Called the Atelier, it has the purpose of bringing the courses together and to provide exposure to real world tools that are useful to computer scientists, including Unix
, LaTeX
, HTML
/CSS
, CVS
.
Students are expected to learn about a wide variety of topics, from big-O notation and calculus
, through networking protocols and layers, to computer architecture. A variety of programming languages are used. Programming is introduced through Scheme and functional programming
throughout the first semester, in parallel with the computer architecture course (which uses MIPS assembly
). Later on, C
and mostly Java
are used. The curriculum puts a strong emphasis on teamwork, with a major group project happening at the end of every semester.
Master topics include Software Design
, Dependable
Distributed Systems
, Embedded System
Design
(see ALaRI), Intelligent Systems
(with IDSIA
), Applied Informatics
.
Università della Svizzera italiana had 2852 students in 2010-2011; of these 1039 (37%) are Swiss, and 1813 (63%) are foreign - from Italy (38%) or from over one hundred other nationalities (25%). Exchange students (see Erasmus
) for 2009-2010 were 104.
In leisure time, students participate in city-sponsored
tourism events, school-sponsored sporting activities, and student associations, despite the town
's small population. Twenty student associations have been established, with student clubs oriented around economics (AIESEC
, Finance Floor USI), informatics (EESTEC, IEEE student branch), and communications (L'universo newspaper). Student clubs help orient students beyond the scope and purpose of the university orientation program, providing both professional guidance and information in career choices, and shorter-term personal experience sharing on services and entertainment within student financial means otherwise not advertised in Lugano.
Public university
A public university is a university that is predominantly funded by public means through a national or subnational government, as opposed to private universities. A national university may or may not be considered a public university, depending on regions...
university
University
A university is an institution of higher education and research, which grants academic degrees in a variety of subjects. A university is an organisation that provides both undergraduate education and postgraduate education...
located in Lugano
Lugano
Lugano is a city of inhabitants in the city proper and a total of over 145,000 people in the agglomeration/city region, in the south of Switzerland, in the Italian-speaking canton of Ticino, which borders Italy...
, Switzerland, founded in 1996. USI has four faculties (schools), and follows the European standard of three-year undergraduate studies and two-year master's (in Italian or English).
Campus
The Lugano campus developed around an existing neo-classical structure that was originally the city hospital circa 1996. Several state-of-the-art buildings have been added, most notably Informatics (2007), Aula Magna, Aule, Library, and LAB.The main building consists of four floors containing: Communications and Economics offices (1-3), the Executive Centre, four computer labs (1), classrooms (1-3), the ALaRI institute (4), dining-center (2)(Q1-2007), and third-floor auditorium (3)(Q3-2007). The library is four floors tall: study tables line the interior, and a moderate collection of books and periodicals extend to the periphery; books can be requested from other libraries (e.g. ETH Zurich
ETH Zurich
The Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich or ETH Zürich is an engineering, science, technology, mathematics and management university in the City of Zurich, Switzerland....
). The LAB has six floors: three floors dedicated as partitioned study & research space for Economics students; its name originates from its purpose as ETH Zurich
ETH Zurich
The Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich or ETH Zürich is an engineering, science, technology, mathematics and management university in the City of Zurich, Switzerland....
's Chemical & Applied Biosciences Department.
Informatics (academic field)
Informatics is the science of information, the practice of information processing, and the engineering of information systems. Informatics studies the structure, algorithms, behavior, and interactions of natural and artificial systems that store, process, access and communicate information...
building finished in 2007 contains classrooms (1), offices and study areas reserved for CS
Computer science
Computer science or computing science is the study of the theoretical foundations of information and computation and of practical techniques for their implementation and application in computer systems...
students and mentors (2-3). The university parking lot is hosted underneath Informatics and Aule.
Aula Magna is a university's convention hall and capable of seating over 1,000 people; it is used to host university conferences, speeches, and classical music concerts; and solely the entrance to the hall is visible above ground. South of the main building, the Central Services offices houses the presidency and core services of the university, and the Institutes provide offices for PhD students, assistants, and other research students.
Infrastructure
On-campus buildings require student ID badges for access to university facilities. Campus-wide Wi-FiIEEE 802.11
IEEE 802.11 is a set of standards for implementing wireless local area network computer communication in the 2.4, 3.6 and 5 GHz frequency bands. They are created and maintained by the IEEE LAN/MAN Standards Committee . The base version of the standard IEEE 802.11-2007 has had subsequent...
and wired Internet access connects students to the Swiss SWITCH
SWITCH Information Technology Services
SWITCH is the manager of the .ch and .li country-code top-level domains for Switzerland and Liechtenstein, respectively. It also manages the educational networks among Swiss universities, and the links to other university networks. It also mirrors open source software .- External links :**...
network.
There is an apartment building owned by the school in town (Casa dell' Accademia). Other apartments are obtained through local agencies.
Departments & Faculty
USI has four faculties, three of which are located on the main campus, namely, Economics, Communication Science, and Informatics. The faculty of Architecture is located in the nearby town of MendrisioMendrisio
Mendrisio is a municipality in the district of Mendrisio in the canton of Ticino in Switzerland.Mendrisio is the seat of the Accademia di Architettura of the university of Italian speaking Switzerland ....
. The campus is also shared with a theology department which is not affiliated with the university.
Architecture
Led by Director Mario BottaMario Botta
Mario Botta is a Swiss architect. He studied at the Liceo Artistico in Milan and the IUAV in Venice. His ideas were influenced by Le Corbusier, Carlo Scarpa, Louis Kahn. He opened his own practice in 1970 in Lugano.-Career:...
. With forty lecturers and twenty-five design studios (including the famous Mario Botta
Mario Botta
Mario Botta is a Swiss architect. He studied at the Liceo Artistico in Milan and the IUAV in Venice. His ideas were influenced by Le Corbusier, Carlo Scarpa, Louis Kahn. He opened his own practice in 1970 in Lugano.-Career:...
, Massimo Carmassi
Massimo Carmassi
Massimo Carmassi is an Italian architect.- Biography :Massimo Carmassi graduated from the Faculty of Architecture in Florence in 1970. In 1974, he established the Project Office of the Commune of Pisa and directed it till 1990. From 1981 to 1985, he was the chairman of the Architectural...
, Valerio Olgiati
Valerio Olgiati
Valerio Olgiati is an internationally active Swiss architect.- Biography :Valerio Olgiati studied architecture until 1986 at ETH Zürich. Having lived and worked first in Zurich and later in Los Angeles for some years, in 1996 he opened his own practice in Zurich and in 2008 in Flims...
), the Accademia
Accademia di Architettura di Mendrisio
The Accademia di Architettura di Mendrisio belongs to Università della Svizzera italiana. It's amongst the most prestigious schools of architecture in Europe.- Present faculty members :* Mario Botta* Quintus Miller* Valerio Olgiati* Jonathan Sergison...
in Mendrisio
Mendrisio
Mendrisio is a municipality in the district of Mendrisio in the canton of Ticino in Switzerland.Mendrisio is the seat of the Accademia di Architettura of the university of Italian speaking Switzerland ....
trains 712 students for 3-year bachelor, and 2-year masters degree (2011).
Economics
Led by deanDean (education)
In academic administration, a dean is a person with significant authority over a specific academic unit, or over a specific area of concern, or both...
Rico Maggi. 1029 students (2011). Topics: Banking, Finance
Finance
"Finance" is often defined simply as the management of money or “funds” management Modern finance, however, is a family of business activity that includes the origination, marketing, and management of cash and money surrogates through a variety of capital accounts, instruments, and markets created...
, Management
Management
Management in all business and organizational activities is the act of getting people together to accomplish desired goals and objectives using available resources efficiently and effectively...
, Economics and International Policies (it); Financial Communication, Marketing
Marketing
Marketing is the process used to determine what products or services may be of interest to customers, and the strategy to use in sales, communications and business development. It generates the strategy that underlies sales techniques, business communication, and business developments...
; in English and Italian.
Communication Science
Led by deanDean (education)
In academic administration, a dean is a person with significant authority over a specific academic unit, or over a specific area of concern, or both...
Lorenzo Cantoni. 865 students (2011). Topics: Media, new media and journalism, Marketing
Marketing
Marketing is the process used to determine what products or services may be of interest to customers, and the strategy to use in sales, communications and business development. It generates the strategy that underlies sales techniques, business communication, and business developments...
, Corporate Communication, Public communication, Healthcare communication, Information and communication technologies
Information and communication technologies
Information and communications technology or information and communication technology, usually abbreviated as ICT, is often used as an extended synonym for information technology , but is usually a more general term that stresses the role of unified communications and the integration of...
, Education
Education
Education in its broadest, general sense is the means through which the aims and habits of a group of people lives on from one generation to the next. Generally, it occurs through any experience that has a formative effect on the way one thinks, feels, or acts...
and Tourism
Tourism
Tourism is travel for recreational, leisure or business purposes. The World Tourism Organization defines tourists as people "traveling to and staying in places outside their usual environment for not more than one consecutive year for leisure, business and other purposes".Tourism has become a...
, mainly in Italian and English.
Informatics
Led by Dean Mauro Pezzé. Founded in 2004, it offers the only undergraduate program at USI, with English as the language of instruction. The founding deanDean (education)
In academic administration, a dean is a person with significant authority over a specific academic unit, or over a specific area of concern, or both...
was Mehdi Jazayeri
Mehdi Jazayeri
Mehdi Jazayeri is the founding dean of the faculty of informatics of the Università della Svizzera italiana in Lugano, Switzerland, and author of several textbooks on computer software....
, a senior member and fellow of the IEEE and author of several books. Mauro Pezzè became dean in 2010.
First year students cover mathematical topics, computer architecture, networking, and fundamental concepts of programming. A further course persists throughout the 3 year undergraduate curriculum. Called the Atelier, it has the purpose of bringing the courses together and to provide exposure to real world tools that are useful to computer scientists, including Unix
Unix
Unix is a multitasking, multi-user computer operating system originally developed in 1969 by a group of AT&T employees at Bell Labs, including Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Brian Kernighan, Douglas McIlroy, and Joe Ossanna...
, LaTeX
LaTeX
LaTeX is a document markup language and document preparation system for the TeX typesetting program. Within the typesetting system, its name is styled as . The term LaTeX refers only to the language in which documents are written, not to the editor used to write those documents. In order to...
, HTML
HTML
HyperText Markup Language is the predominant markup language for web pages. HTML elements are the basic building-blocks of webpages....
/CSS
CSS
-Computing:*Cascading Style Sheets, a language used to describe the style of document presentations in web development*Central Structure Store in the PHIGS 3D API*Closed source software, software that is not distributed with source code...
, CVS
Concurrent Versions System
The Concurrent Versions System , also known as the Concurrent Versioning System, is a client-server free software revision control system in the field of software development. Version control system software keeps track of all work and all changes in a set of files, and allows several developers ...
.
Students are expected to learn about a wide variety of topics, from big-O notation and calculus
Calculus
Calculus is a branch of mathematics focused on limits, functions, derivatives, integrals, and infinite series. This subject constitutes a major part of modern mathematics education. It has two major branches, differential calculus and integral calculus, which are related by the fundamental theorem...
, through networking protocols and layers, to computer architecture. A variety of programming languages are used. Programming is introduced through Scheme and functional programming
Functional programming
In computer science, functional programming is a programming paradigm that treats computation as the evaluation of mathematical functions and avoids state and mutable data. It emphasizes the application of functions, in contrast to the imperative programming style, which emphasizes changes in state...
throughout the first semester, in parallel with the computer architecture course (which uses MIPS assembly
MIPS architecture
MIPS is a reduced instruction set computer instruction set architecture developed by MIPS Technologies . The early MIPS architectures were 32-bit, and later versions were 64-bit...
). Later on, C
C (programming language)
C is a general-purpose computer programming language developed between 1969 and 1973 by Dennis Ritchie at the Bell Telephone Laboratories for use with the Unix operating system....
and mostly Java
Java (programming language)
Java is a programming language originally developed by James Gosling at Sun Microsystems and released in 1995 as a core component of Sun Microsystems' Java platform. The language derives much of its syntax from C and C++ but has a simpler object model and fewer low-level facilities...
are used. The curriculum puts a strong emphasis on teamwork, with a major group project happening at the end of every semester.
Master topics include Software Design
Software design
Software design is a process of problem solving and planning for a software solution. After the purpose and specifications of software are determined, software developers will design or employ designers to develop a plan for a solution...
, Dependable
Dependability
Dependability is a value showing the reliability of a person to others because of his/her integrity, truthfulness, and trustfulness, traits that can encourage someone to depend on him/her.The wider use of this noun is in Systems engineering....
Distributed Systems
Distributed computing
Distributed computing is a field of computer science that studies distributed systems. A distributed system consists of multiple autonomous computers that communicate through a computer network. The computers interact with each other in order to achieve a common goal...
, Embedded System
Embedded system
An embedded system is a computer system designed for specific control functions within a larger system. often with real-time computing constraints. It is embedded as part of a complete device often including hardware and mechanical parts. By contrast, a general-purpose computer, such as a personal...
Design
Design
Design as a noun informally refers to a plan or convention for the construction of an object or a system while “to design” refers to making this plan...
(see ALaRI), Intelligent Systems
Intelligent Systems
is a Japanese first-party video game developer and internal team of Nintendo Co., Ltd. It has its headquarters in the Nintendo Kyoto Research Center in Higashiyama-ku, Kyoto, Kyoto Prefecture....
(with IDSIA
IDSIA
The Swiss institute for Artificial Intelligence IDSIA was founded in 1988 by the private Dalle Molle foundation...
), Applied Informatics
Informatics (academic field)
Informatics is the science of information, the practice of information processing, and the engineering of information systems. Informatics studies the structure, algorithms, behavior, and interactions of natural and artificial systems that store, process, access and communicate information...
.
Student life and culture
Erasmus programme
The Erasmus Programme , a.k.a. Erasmus Project is a European Union student exchange programme established in 1987...
) for 2009-2010 were 104.
In leisure time, students participate in city-sponsored
Lugano
Lugano is a city of inhabitants in the city proper and a total of over 145,000 people in the agglomeration/city region, in the south of Switzerland, in the Italian-speaking canton of Ticino, which borders Italy...
tourism events, school-sponsored sporting activities, and student associations, despite the town
Lugano
Lugano is a city of inhabitants in the city proper and a total of over 145,000 people in the agglomeration/city region, in the south of Switzerland, in the Italian-speaking canton of Ticino, which borders Italy...
's small population. Twenty student associations have been established, with student clubs oriented around economics (AIESEC
AIESEC
AIESEC is a global youth organisation that develops leadership capabilities through their internal leadership programmes and engaging students and graduates in international student exchange and internship programmes for profit and non-profit organisations. Its international office is in...
, Finance Floor USI), informatics (EESTEC, IEEE student branch), and communications (L'universo newspaper). Student clubs help orient students beyond the scope and purpose of the university orientation program, providing both professional guidance and information in career choices, and shorter-term personal experience sharing on services and entertainment within student financial means otherwise not advertised in Lugano.