Month: October 2016

An international conference on innovation and entrepreneurship education was held at the Technion as part of activity of GNAM, a network of 28 business schools

The Global Network for Advanced Management (GNAM), established by Yale School of Management, chose Technion for the Unconference on Innovation and Entrepreneurship Education, chaired by Prof. Miriam Erez, in August 2016. The Unconference structure allowed all participants to take an active part in the discussions. 50 representatives from 19 business schools around the world, participated in the Unconference, including Deans, faculty members, students and alumni.

The conference participants discussed the content and methods of innovation and entrepreneurship education. A visit to one accelerator – MassChallenge Israel, and one venture capital – JVP, in Jerusalem, provided the opportunity to learn about the “start-up nation”.

Participants witnessed an exciting and unexpected meeting between an entrepreneur from Nigeria, who is at the MassChallenge Israel, and the Dean of the School of Management from Nigeria. This event was said to demonstrate the open and welcoming atmosphere of the entrepreneurship community in Israel. “An atmosphere of sharing and harmony was created among the conference partricipants,” said Prof. Erez, “which will form the basis for further fruitful cooperation between the schools for the benefit of the students, faculty and academic institutions.”

The Technion MBA Program was involved in the establishment of GNAM in 2012. The network currently includes 28 business schools. The aim is the promotion of innovation and generation of value by forging ties among these schools.

Prof. Edward Snyder, Dean of the Yale School of Management, said that the GNAM network is based on mutual respect, equality (“the network belongs to everyone, not to Yale University”), and the principle that no fee is charged for the exchange of information. “This creates a community of friends that fosters innovation and collaboration,” he said.

Prof. Avishai Mandelbaum, Dean of the Technion Faculty of Industrial Engineering and Management, told participants that the faculty leads entrepreneurship at the Technion and promotes unique interdisciplinary pairings: management and engineering; economics and computer engineering; service engineering and Big Data.

The current conference was designed to explore issues related to innovation and entrepreneurship education. Prof. Erez stressed that graduates of Business Administration programs currently manage global companies and, therefore, an international network that offers students intercultural encounters and the opportunity to take part in multicultural work groups gives Technion a unique value.

“As part of the cooperation between the schools, we hold an annual joint program in which around 40 students from around the world come to the Technion for Start-up Nation Week, which focuses on entrepreneurship and innovation. At the same time, our students attend intensive one-week programs at schools abroad. This is how the global network develops, and the Technion’s MBA students are part of it.”

On Tuesday, October 25, two thousand new students began their first year at the Technion. The faculties most in demand for undergraduate degrees are Medicine, Electrical Engineering, Computer Science, Mechanical Engineering and Industrial Engineering and Management.

The 2016-17 school year began at the Technion with approximately 2,000 new students. This year the Technion has approximately 14,000 students in 18 faculties: around 9,500 undergraduate students and around 4,500 graduate students, including 1,109 doctoral candidates.

Of the new students who began their undergraduate studies, 43% are women.
The proportion of women among graduate students is 48%, and among doctoral candidates, 43%.

Over the past decade there has been a significant increase in the percentage of undergraduates from minority groups attending the Technion. Of the students from minority groups who began their studies this year, 61% are women, a higher proportion than among Jewish students and higher than any other academic institution in Israel and the Middle East.

Addressing the new students at the ceremony marking the opening of the school year, Technion President Prof. Peretz Lavie said: “This is a holiday for you and for us. You are here today after having proved, through hard work and achievements in high school or in your pre-academic studies, that you deserve to be students at the Technion. You are joining one of the world’s leading academic institutions, but first and foremost you are joining a new family: the Technion family. In this extended family, secular and religious Jews, Muslims, Christians, Druze and Circassians of both sexes coexist in full equality, conducting a constant, pertinent, open and tolerant dialogue.”

New programs that opened at the Technion in 2016-17 school year:

• The Data Science and Engineering Program (Undergraduate):

The goal of the program, which is offered by the Faculty of Industrial Engineering and Management, is to train engineers to handle Big Data in a variety of applications. In view of the increase in the amount of data produced worldwide, there is a need for engineers who can manage the information, i.e., collect, store, extract and analyze information from large databases. Prof. Avigdor Gal, who heads the new program, explains that “here, as in other cases, the Technion’s advantage is manifested: a combination of experts from various disciplines, including statistics, computer science, information systems, game theory, cognition, and economics. This is the integration that served as the basis for the new program, which addresses the growing and important field of information science and Big Data.”

• Master’s Degree in the Views Program

The Views Program for Technion graduates, held at the Faculty of Education Science and Technology, is expanding and will now offer a master’s degree. Starting this year, the program will also offer a master’s degree and teaching certificate with a full tuition scholarship. In light of the success of the Views Program, in which hundreds of Technion graduates received a full tuition scholarship for an additional undergraduate degree in teaching science, math and engineering, the Technion now offers a new and upgraded program for its outstanding graduates. The master’s degree program includes a teaching certificate for post-primary schools (seventh through twelfth grades).

Avigail  Landman, a doctoral student at the Technion, won first place in the Three Minute Thesis competition in Australia

Avigail  Landman, a doctoral student in the Grand Technion Energy Program (GTEP), won first place in an international lecture competition in Brisbane, Australia. In the competition, participants must present a scientific-technological subject related to their thesis in just three minutes.

The subject of Landman’s doctoral dissertation, supervised jointly by Prof. Gideon Grader from the Faculty of Chemical Engineering and Prof. Avner Rothschild from the Faculty of Materials Science and Engineering, is the production of hydrogen using solar energy. “More specifically, I am designing and developing a system that will make it possible to use solar energy to split water into oxygen and hydrogen. The oxygen will be produced in the solar field itself, while the hydrogen will be produced directly on the premises of the end user, for example at a hydrogen fueling station.”

The Three Minute Thesis (3MT) competition in Australia was held by the University of Queensland, and Landman came on Prof. Grader’s recommendation. She said, “We worked together on the script, we recorded the video here at the Technion with the generous assistance of Ami Hartstein from the Center for Promotion of Teaching, and sent it to the competition. A few weeks later, I was informed that I had been chosen as one of the 16 finalists in the competition and was invited to deliver the lecture in Brisbane. In the end, I won first place in the energy category, one of the three categories in the competition.”

Remembering Ron

Ron Arad was a Technion student on active reserve duty (“Miluim”) when he was captured.

Arad, a Weapon Systems Officer (WSO) in the Israeli Air force, had just completed his first year of chemical engineering studies at Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa when he was called up for reserve duty. On October 16, 1986 Arad was captured by members of the Amal Shi’ite militia after bailing out of his crippled F-4 Phantom jet, over the Lebanese city of Sidon.

An original engineering approach developed at the Technion enables the building of light and durable speed boats suited to rough seas; experiments conducted on new research boat Dganit validate this approach

 

An innovative research vessel has been developed at the Technion to test a novel design approach. Technion scientists built the speed boat to test their new design procedure that makes it possible to significantly reduce the vessel’s scantlings – the dimensions of the frame – thus reducing its weight, increasing its speed, and reducing its fuel consumption.

The new vessel, named Dganit, merges “traditional” design with the new approach: its port side complies with standard design rules, while its starboard side is constructed using the new method.

Technion President Prof. Peretz Lavie said: “I don’t know how many of you know, but during the 1930s Technion had a nautical school, because Haifa is a port city. The Technion started by helping to design ships and to construct boats. Here we are closing a historical circle. Technion researchers joined forces with industry to build the Dganit – a new boat made out of new materials, based on new engineering principles, that will be lighter, faster and durable. I am very proud of Technion achievements.”

Dganit was designed and built over the past three years by Profs. Nitai Drimer and Daniel Rittel from Technion’s Faculty of Mechanical Engineering; by Sela Ltd. and Sherman Carmel, two firms owned by Benny Danino; and by postgraduates Yahav Moshkovich, Or Neuberg and Oren Rijensky, the latter of whom is in a direct PhD program. The collaboration between the Technion and the two firms took place under the MEIMAD program for encouraging R&D of dual use technologies. (MEIMAD is a collaborative program between the Ministry of Defense, the OCS at the Ministry of Industry, Trade and Labor and the Ministry of Finance, to jointly promote new ideas and new technologies that can serve both commercial applications and military needs.)

“It was a complex, fascinating challenge,” says Rittel, head of Technion’s Materials Mechanics Center. “I’m not even a marine vehicle specialist, so for me it meant starting from scratch and ending up with an actual boat that supports our research. Israeli bravado – pushing the limits, challenging the system, thinking out of the box and not fearing failure – definitely played a major part here.”

The boat is the brainchild of Danino and Drimer. Speed boat design, explains Drimer, involves some trade-offs between the light weight needed for speed, and the strength needed to resist the force of the waves while cruising at high speed in the open sea. “The more knowledge and experience I gathered, the more I realized that existing design standards, set by classification societies, produce relatively heavy and robust vessels; but only as a researcher at the Technion did I manage to get to the root of the problem.”

After his appointment as head of the Naval Architecture Division at Technion’s Faculty of Mechanical Engineering, Drimer continued researching the topic with Rittel. Together with their students they developed their innovative approach that takes into account design aspects relevant to conditions of extreme stress at sea: dynamics, hydro-elasticity, and nonlinear structural effects and Dganit was born. A comprehensive series of tests with the vessel successfully verified the rational design procedure, which was discussed in two Technion Master’s theses as well as in a paper published this year in the journal Ships and Offshore Structures.

“The most common concept for speed boats,” explains Drimer, “is planing, where most of the boat’s weight is supported by hydrodynamic lift. Having so much of its mass outside the water reduces water resistance and speeds up the boat. The problem is that in rough seas, planing exposes the hull to great slamming pressure by the water impact.”

Conventional practical design – based on classification society standards – treats the slamming pressure as quasi static, a premise that according to Drimer does not reflect reality when dealing with elastic structures. “We take a more complex, exact approach to wave-boat interactions, based on a design philosophy, an algorithm and analytical tools we have developed.”

The starboard side of Dganit incorporates advanced materials that make it largely fail proof. The technology, currently being patented, was developed by Rittel in collaboration with Sela Ltd.

“The boat has proved its practical value – that is, validated our design,” says Drimer. “This design is suitable for racing, rescue, intercept and other fast boats. Next, I intend to approach a classification society and propose developing a new standard. If we succeed, we can expect to see many boats built in accordance with our approach.”

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Slide Photo: Boat Developers team. standing (L-R) : Oren Rijensky, Or Neuberg. Sitting (L-R) : Prof. Nitai Drimer, Prof. Daniel Rittel, Yahav Moshkovich

 Photo by: Nitzan Zohar, Technion Spokesperson’s Office

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New findings explain how cancer treatment accelerates the violence of the disease. Team now working to develop effective ways to delay mechanism

HAIFA, ISRAEL and NEW YORK (October 6, 2016) – Even with today’s safer and more targeted anti-cancer drugs, scientists have been unable to satisfactorily explain the phenomenon of why treated cancers so often recur. The common theory is that the cancer cell develops “internal resistance to treatment,” and overrides the toxic effects of the drug.

Now, findings by a team of scientists led by Professor Yuval Shaked of the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology Faculty of Medicine and the Technion Integrated Cancer Center (TICC) could provide the key for reducing recurrence, and allowing anti-cancer drugs to do work as intended.

In their study published recently in The Journal of Pathology, the team shows that tumor relapse occurs when the body, in effect, mobilizes itself in favor of the tumor, causing recurrence of the disease, increasing its aggressiveness and creating metastases or tumor spread. Even selective, highly focused treatments that harm cancer cells almost exclusively lead to a similar response.

“The administration of an anti-cancer drug is very aggressive intervention in the body,” explains Prof. Shaked. “Therefore, the body responds to chemotherapy the way it responds to trauma. This creates the effect of a double-edged sword: although chemotherapy kills cancer cells, it also causes the secretion of substances that confer resistance to the tumor. Even more selective treatments, with fewer side effects, cause physiological reactions that increase the aggressiveness of the disease.”

In this specific study, among other studies the group has published in this area, mice with multiple myeloma – a malignant disease of the plasma cells produced in bone marrow and spread throughout the body via the circulatory system – were treated with the selective anti-cancer drug Velcade (bortezomib). (Velcade is based on the discovery of ubiquitin, for which Professors Avram Hershko and Aaron Ciechanover of the Technion Faculty of Medicine won the Nobel Prize.)

The researchers found that treatment with Velcade led to a physiological reaction that actually reinforced the intensity of the myeloma in the mice. According to Prof. Shaked, the drug caused inflammatory cells (macrophages) in the bone marrow to enhance the aggressiveness of the disease and provide the cancer cells with resistance to treatment.

“It is important to clarify that treatment with Velcade is essential and necessary,” says Prof. Shaked, “but its disadvantage is that along with the benefit there is damage.”

Next steps: inhibiting the mechanism that enhances the tumor

According to Prof. Shaked, “…understanding the mechanisms that enhance the tumor and accelerate the spread of metastases will enable us to develop methods to inhibit them.”

In fact, when the researchers inhibited the secreted factor related to the activity of inflammatory cells, they observed a decrease in the proliferation of cancer cells. Now they are working on various ways to inhibit the body’s response to anti-cancer treatments.

“Ultimately we are talking about a trade-off between the intensity of the treatment and the intensity of the physical response. The moment the ratio is in favor of the treatment and to the detriment of the response, we will achieve effective treatment without a ‘fine’ in the form of enhanced metastasis. In addition, we can inhibit the body’s response using existing drugs, thereby enabling the anticancer drugs to get the job done.”

The study was led by Dr. Ofrat Beyar Katz, a doctoral student at Prof. Shaked’s lab specializing in hematology at Rambam Healthcare Campus, with the participation of Prof. Irit Avivi from the Rambam Department of Hematology and Prof. Yosef Yarden from the Weizmann Institute of Science. The study was supported by the European Union (ERC grant) and the Israeli Ministry of Health.

Slide Photo: Members of Prof. Yuval Shaked laboratory, from left to right: Hila Berkovich, Dr. Orit Kaidar-Person, Tal Kan, Yelena Barbarov, Dvir Shechter, Dror, Alishekevitz (research team member), Prof. Yuval Shaked (team leader), Michael Timaner (research team member), Dr. Ofrat Beyar-Katz (research leader), Dr. Erez Hasnis, Shiri Davidi, Ruslana Kotsofruk, Valeria Miller (research team member). Not shown in the photo: Ksenia Magidey and Neta Ben Tzedek (research team members) and Dr. Ziv Raviv (lab manager).
Photo by: Pioter Fliter, Rambam Healthcare Campus.

 

Bank Hapoalim, Israel’s largest bank, is joining forces with Technion to advance innovation research in a variety of fields, including Data Science.