The Technion Senate reelected the President Professor Peretz Lavie, by an overwhelming majority (92 in favor, 2 against and 2 abstentions) for a second four-year presidential term. The decision was approved unanimously a couple of days ago, by the Managing Committee of the institute. The nomination must also be approved by the Board of Governors, which will convene in the month of June of this year.

During his first term as president (2009-2013), Professor Peretz Lavie set at the top of his objectives the issue of recruiting new faculty members, a university’s most important asset, as well as appropriating resources essential for settling them comfortably and smooth integration to the Technion. From the very beginning of his presidential term and until the end of it (in 2013), the Technion recruited 130 new faculty members, and the number of faculty will have grown from 533 members to 564.

The second objective of Professor Lavie was to change the learning environment on campus by revamping the Technion’s image from a “rigid” institute that is inconsiderate to the wellbeing of its student body. “We are now in the midst of a process to transform this image – I will point out a number of actions we took in order to get to this stage,” says Professor Lavie. “Firstly, we continued and expanded the program “A Good Start” whose goal was to ease the “shock” of first year study loads at the Technion, particularly by improving the teaching of mathematics. Secondly, in cooperation with the Student Association, we made significant steps towards improving services to students, such as greater transparency regarding examination marks, the introduction of regulations that enforce a maximum time period for marking exams and publicizing test results, as well as significantly more lenient examinations procedures that are considerate to students in reserve duty or involved in parenting. Additionally, we began to upgrade and renovate teaching facilities in most of the faculties, for the benefit of students. The program “Spirited Campus” encourages students to enrich and vary their leisure time on campus. Recently, an interactive map of the Technion campus was launched onto the university’s website, showing the wide range of events and possibilities for spending leisure time on campus.” Professor Lavie mentioned the “Yanai Awards” – an individual award given to faculty members for outstanding excellence in academic education, and for the establishment of the Graduate Student Village providing high standard accommodations to graduate students with families.

In Professor Lavie’s first term as Technion President, a substantial increase was recorded in the research funds and in revenue from intellectual property, from seven million US dollars in 2008, to 21 million dollars in 2012. To encourage the commercialization of intellectual property, an investment fund was established for Technion companies and a seed fund to finance research under the Nevet Program.

Professor Lavie emphasized the momentous honor the university received jointly with Cornell University, upon being chosen by the city of New York in an international challenge, to establish an institute of scientific research and applied engineering in the heart of Manhattan. According to the President, winning this challenge, which was entered by over 40 leading universities from the United States and around the world, focused the attention of the academic world on the Technion’s achievements.

The recruitment of excellent faculty members will remain at the forefront of Professor Lavie’s objectives in his second presidential term. “The quality of the Technion and its future status will be determined by, first and foremost, the quality of its faculty,” says Professor Lavie. The Technion President added that in the next four years he will continue to develop interdisciplinary research centers in addition to the establishment of centers of excellence awarded to the Technion in a national challenge by Israel’s Council for Higher Education. Additionally, development will continue with respect to the international activities on the Haifa campus. “For this reason we have created a new framework, “Technion International,” which unifies all of the Technion authorities responsible for and connected to international activities on campus,” he said. “In the next four years we will continue to work towards increasing the numbers of foreign post-doctoral and graduate students on campus, while meticulously adhering to ensuring their academic standing, in keeping with how this process has been done to date.”

The Declarations of Independence of the United States of America and the State of Israel, inscribed on a silicon chip affixed to a Jerusalem Stone dating to the Second Temple Period

As requested by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, scientists of the Technion’s Russell Berrie Nanotechnology Institute inscribed replicas of the Declarations of Independence of the United States of America and the State of Israel side-by-side on a gold-coated silicon chip, using a focused beam of high energy gallium ions. The area of the etched inscription is 0.04 square mm, and it is 20 nanometer, or 0.00002 mm, deep. The chip was affixed to a Jerusalem Stone dating to the Second Temple Period (1^st century BCE to 1^st century CE), such as the stones used to seal clay vessels. .

The etching was done by accelerating charged atoms, called ions, and bombarding them at various points on the surface of the chip. When an ion beam hits the chip it creates a tiny recess, in this case 20 nanometers deep. This is similar to digging tiny holes in the ground using a water jet out of an irrigation hose, except that the holes formed this way are a million times bigger than the holes created by the beam of ions.

The silicon chip is coated with a 20 nanometer thick gold film.  When the ion beam forms a hole 20 nanometers deep at a certain point on the surface of the chip, it sputters away the gold film, revealing the silicon beneath it. Scanning the chip with an electron microscope shows that the regions where the silicon was exposed are darker than the surrounding gold coated areas. Thus, any image can be transferred to the chip.

The preparation work for the etching took about a week. The image etched on the chip contains over two million dots. The ion beam was aimed at the required dots on the chip using a computer, so that the entire engraving process took less than an hour.

During the engraving the chip was part of a round silicon slice 5 centimeters in diameter and 0.13 millimeters thick. The chip was detached from the slice by chemically corroding the silicon slice around it with an advanced plasma tool.

The original image was translated into etching instructions using a special program developed for this purpose by Dr. Ohad Zohar, who conducted his Ph.D. under Prof. Uri Sivan of the Physics Department. The engraving was done by Dr. Tzipi Cohen-Hyams, in charge of the Focused Ion Beam lab in the Russel Berrie Nanotechnology Institute. The large team that took part in the work comprised Prof. Wayne D. Kaplan, Dean of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering; Prof. Nir Tessler, Head of the Center for Mircoelectronics and Nanoelectronics;  Mr. Yaacov Shneider, Chief Engineer in the Center of Mircoelectronics and Nanoelectronics; Dr. Orna Ternyak, Plasma Senior Engineer in the  Micro and Nanofabrication Unit and Ms. Svetlana Yoffis, process engineer in  the  Micro and Nanofabrication Unit.

Three projects by Technion Researchers and graduates to be presented to President Barack Obama during his visit to Israel.

Snake Robot

The robot was developed by Prof. Alon Wolf of the Faculty for Mechanical Engineering at the Technion. It is designed to enter spaces in areas prone to earthquakes and the collapse of buildings and to assist in location and rescue activities, by transmitting pictures and voices of trapped people. The robot is unique due to its crawling capabilities and is very flexible thanks to large number of links. Each link comprises engines, computer, sensors, wireless communication and batteries. The robot carries a camera in its head. Thanks to the snake’s flexible structure, it is capable of squeezing through the ruins without causing additional collapse of the structure, and is able to provide vital information from inaccessible areas about the condition of trapped people, the existence of hazardous  materials, etc.

ReWalk

Technion graduate Dr. Amit Goffer, founder of “Argo Medical Technologies”, will present the ReWalk, a powered external skeleton that enables  paraplegics to walk and perform other daily functions (sitting, standing,  and climbing/going down the stairs). The ReWalk is the first system of its kind. It is designed  to change the life of paraplegics, and Stephen Hawking  has defined it as one of the five most important machines for humanity. The device has already given almost 200  paraplegics the ability to walk , and  is used in the USA, Europe and Israel, including for partaking in Marathons. Amit will present the ReWalk, and Raddi Kaiuf,  paraplegic as a result of war injury, will demonstrate the system.

The system allows paraplegics to restore lower body function through a designated device that is harnessed to the body. The device is activated by a chargeable battery that lasts the entire day. The system uses motion sensors to identify the user’s movements and translate them to joint movements.

The users no longer need to use a wheelchair and they can move and stand upright. The ReWalk allows the user to walk on planes and slopes.

Generation of future scientists

Yarin Frenkel, Omer Zamir and Omer Shoshan, students at the Haifa Municipal High School C are the winners of an international robotics contest held in Connecticut, USA, in 2012. The students, guided by Prof. Igor Verner and his doctoral candidate Dan Cooperman, of the Department of Education in  Technology and Science at the Technion, have won for their development of a waiter robot that is aimed at demonstrating the ability to serve the  handicapped in their home. They  developed a “human” waiter  robot, which is better accepted by the user. The robot has 18 engines, sensors, a compass and a camera.

From right to left: Yarin Frenkel, Omer Shuham and Omer Zamir

Photos: Technion Spokesman

We conceive the Sun as bright-white source of radiation and only the rainbow, is an everyday indication of the colors its light contains. A quantitative description of the colors emitted by a body held at a given temperature  was first developed by Max Planck in the early days of the previous century, relating the intensity of each color (wavelength) to the temperature of the body – provided the typical dimension of the body is significantly larger than the radiation’s wavelength.  Since inherently Planck’s formula is independent of the characteristics of the material, it is conceived to describe the upper limit to what a body can emit at a given temperature.  In the framework of an article published in PRA we have demonstrated that if the characteristic length of the emitting body is of the order of the wavelength, the intensity it emits, in a narrow range of wavelengths, may exceed significantly the prediction of Planck’s theory.  Such an enhancement may be designed to overlap the spectral region where a photo-voltaic cell performs the best, improving in the process its theoretical efficiency dramatically.

Winning project of the 2012 Amdocs Best Project Contest in collaboration with Qualcomm experts, this indoor navigation system helps you find your way within any large building using your “Smartphone”

Technion students from the Faculty of Computer Science developed a new indoor navigation approach, which enables you to locate your position and find your way around a large building with the help of your “Smartphone.” It was the winning project of the 2012 Amdocs Best Project Contest.

Students Alex Portnov and Dror Baum, supervised by Itai Dabran, Chief Engineer of Technion’s Laboratory of Computer Communication and Networking, and Constantine Elster from Qualcomm, built an indoor map screening and route finding system on a Smartphone that lets the user locate a store in a huge mall, find an office in a large office building, or get to a specific gate at an airport. The mobile system automatically sketches an efficient route to follow, to reach your destination point.

The application operates through multiple pathfinding stages:

1. With the assistance of a Smartphone’s camera, the user photographs a printed or hand-written floor plan, area or maze.
2. The phone sends the diagram to a server, which stores the picture together with additional parameters.
3. The user indicates with his/her finger both the starting and destination points, and the phone sends a request to the server. The server initiates graphic algorithms and displays on the screen a drawing of the shortest distance between the two points that are obstacle free.
4. The picture becomes stored in the server, and is given a QR Code so that it may be reused multiple times.

The algorithms are calculated very fast, and the map and route are drawn in under a minute.

“In effect, we built a framework for indoor map making and navigation, based on a building’s architectural plan,” explain Dror and Alex. “If a shopping mall’s floor plan will be featured in the form of a barcode at the entrance, shoppers will be able to scan it on their Smartphone and within seconds, get the shortest route to their desired store location.”

During the process, distractions such as colors are automatically eliminated from the scanned diagram, so that a clear navigational map can be achieved, upon which routes can be found and drawn.

Above: Dror (on the right) and Alex, with a poster describing their work. Photographed by: Itai Dovran, from the Technion