Month: November 2020

Prof. Ziv is the first Israeli to win the Medal of Honor – the most prestigious award given by the IEEE and one of the most prestigious in the world of technology

The IEEE Medal of Honor, which is one of the most prestigious awards in technology, has been granted to Distinguished Prof. Jacob Ziv (Emeritus) of the Viterbi Faculty of Electrical Engineering at Technion – Israel Institute of Technology. Dist. Prof Ziv is the first Israeli to have won this honor from the International Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. 

Dist. Prof. Ziv is a world pioneer in the field of information theory, and he is co-inventor of both the Lempel-Ziv algorithm and the Wyner-Ziv algorithm. He receives the medal for his: 

“Fundamental contributions to information theory and data compression technology, and for distinguished research leadership.”

IEEE is the world’s largest technical-professional organization, with about half a million members in 150 countries. The association’s Medal of Honor has been awarded to a single winner each year since 1917, in recognition of an exceptional contribution to science and technology. This is IEEE’s most prestigious award and one of the most prestigious in the world of technology, honoring scientists whose exceptional achievements have left a mark for years on technology, society, and engineering.

The winners of the medal have included individuals who have shaped the fields of information, communication, electronics and computing. They include: Claude Shannon, father of information theory; Guglielmo Marconi, inventor of wireless; Gordon Moore, who drafted Moore’s Law; Andrew Grove, who was CEO and chairman of Intel; Harry Nyquist, one of the most prominent figures in communication and system theory; and founders of Qualcomm Dr. Irwin Jacobs and Prof. Andrew Viterbi (who made a significant contribution to the Electrical Engineering Faculty at the Technion which has since been named after him and his late wife Erna).

According to Dean of the Andrew & Erna Viterbi Faculty of Electrical Engineering Prof. Nahum Shimkin: “There is no one more worthy of this award than Distinguished Prof. Ziv. This is a great honor for the Faculty and the Technion as well.”

“This is a great honor for Dist. Prof. Ziv and the Technion,” said Technion President Prof. Uri Sivan. “His groundbreaking scientific and applied contributions are a source of inspiration for the best engineers in the world. His research in the Faculty of Electrical Engineering has brought about a significant revolution that laid the foundations for the Israeli Startup Nation.”

Born in 1931, Prof. Ziv, completed a bachelor’s and master’s degree in electrical engineering at the Technion, followed by a doctorate at MIT (1962). After some eight years of research and development at Raphael and Bell Labs in the United States, he joined the Technion faculty. Over the years he has held senior positions including Vice President of the Technion for Academic Affairs, Chairman of the Planning and Budgeting Committee, and President of the Israeli Academy of Sciences. He is a member of the US National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Dist. Prof. Ziv has won many prestigious awards, including the Israel Defense Award (twice), the Israel Prize in Exact Sciences (1993) the Marconi Award (1995), the Richard Heming Medal (1995), the Shannon Award (1997), the Frontiers of Knowledge Award from the BBVA Foundation (2009), and the EMET Prize (2017).

In 1977, Prof Ziv and Prof. Abraham Lempel of the Faculty of Computer Science published the initial version of the Lempel-Ziv algorithm, and in 1978 the second version. Both versions served as the basis for essential compression technologies including PNG, TIFF, ZIP and GIF and played a major role in PDF (for documents) and MP3 (for music) formats. This is an information compression algorithm that enables lossless compression, regardless of the structure of the data and without prior knowledge of the statistical properties of the data. Based on this algorithm, many of the compression technologies currently used today in memory devices, computers and smartphones were developed.

The Lempel-Ziv algorithm has opened the way for unprecedented technology, enabling the transfer of visual and other information at high speed without loss of information. In 2004, the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) announced that the Lempel-Ziv algorithm is “a milestone in electronics and computer engineering” and that it “made a significant contribution to making the internet an effective means of global communication.”

Dist. Prof. Ziv also participated in the development of the Wyner-Ziv algorithm in Bell Laboratories. This algorithm, which is now part of Microsoft’s operating system, allows the compression of many images from different cameras, and their simultaneous transmission (for example in sports events).

Members of winning group participated in EIT FAN program, held in Faculty of Biotechnology and Food Engineering at the Technion in collaboration with Strauss Group

Israeli startup The Mediterranean Food Lab is one of the three winners in the EIT Food Accelerator Network (EIT FAN) program. EIT Food, Europe’s leading food initiative, aims to accelerate startups that will shape the food world in the coming decades. The Mediterranean Food Lab was founded by Yair Yosefi, Omer Ben Gal, and B.Z. (Ben) Goldberg, who joined forces to harness their individual research and development expertise in plant-based flavoring agents to establish the startup.

Created by the European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT) in 2018, EIT FAN was held for the third time this year in the Technion Faculty of Biotechnology and Food Engineering and five other hubs in Switzerland, Germany, the UK, Spain and Finland. The program at the Technion is run in collaboration with Strauss Group, and is one of the first programs to focus on the cultivation of innovation and entrepreneurship in the food sector.

This year, 60 companies were selected from 400 applicants to participate in EIT FAN across its six hubs. In Israel, the program took place at the Technion, under the leadership of Associate Professor Uri Lesmes (Academic Director), Dr. Avital Regev Siman-Tov (CEO) and Prof. Eyal Shimoni (Strauss Group), with the participation of ten startups from Israel, Italy, and the UK. Two outstanding companies from each hub progressed to the final stage of the European contest, where the top 3 finalists were selected by a professional international panel of academic and industry experts.

The three winners in the European finals are startups active in different categories: The Mediterranean Food Lab of Israel, develops natural solutions that improve the deliciousness of plant-based foods in general and meat alternatives in particular; Odd.Bot of the Netherlands, which developed the “Weed Whacker”, an intelligent in-row weeding robot that will reduce the use of crop protection products; and UK-based Arborea, which has developed artificial BioSolar leaves that generate breathable oxygen and remove carbon dioxide from the air. Each of the companies will receive €100,000.

The Mediterranean Food Lab develops natural, healthy flavor bases that are sustainably produced and affordable, using novel modalities based on traditional, multi-phase, solid state fermentation of plantprotein. This year, the company also won a grant from the Good Food Institute to research the potential of traditional Southeast Asian foods for the development of rich flavors for the alternative meat sector.

B.Z. Goldberg, CEO and R&D Director of The Mediterranean Food Lab, explained that the rapid expansion of the alternative meat sector is thus far mainly limited to emulating meat as a main protein serving, “a large piece of protein that sits in the middle of your plate, such as hamburgers, steaks, chicken nuggets, etc.” However, large pieces of protein account for only 20% of the global meat market by volume. By contrast, the use of meat to enhance and improve the flavor other foods accounts for 30% of the market. “Even if we stop slaughtering animals to produce hamburgers and steak, the food world will still need billions of animals each year to feed our appetite for the flavor enhancing qualities and meaty flavor profile presently delivered by animal protein, unless there is a  great tasting  alternative. And that is what we’re working on,” he said.

Goldberg explains that the accelerator program at the Technion, which included intensive studies, access to mentors from industry, and ongoing advice from the staff of the Technion’s Faculty of Biotechnology and Food Engineering, gave the company highly significant impetus. Winning the finals of the local competition at the Technion granted The Mediterranean Food Lab a ticket to compete in the European finals of the program, against other outstanding companies that had been declared winners in the various European hubs.

“We believe innovation holds the key to fixing our food system so that it is healthier and more sustainable for all”, said Benoit Buntinx, Director of Business Creation at EIT Food. “These startups and scaleups represent the inclusivity and innovation of the EIT Food community and embody the important role entrepreneurs will play, if we are to accelerate the transformation of the food system.”

“The EIT Food Accelerator Network is a unique pan-European program established to catalyze significant breakthroughs, mainly by providing support and advice to new startups and entrepreneurs,” said Prof. Uri Lesmes of the Faculty of Biotechnology and Food Engineering. “The companies that participated in the program at the Technion are engaged in finding food alternatives and in enriching the food chain as we know it – a common trend in the food world today. This year the COVID-19 crisis forced us to exercise our Israeli agility and adapt the program into a hybrid format, integrating online learning with practical workshops at the Faculty. I am proud to say we were the only hub to do so, and to persist in fostering the growth of startups. This continues to support Israel’s leading position at the forefront of food-tech innovation. Israeli entrepreneurs have brought creativity and daring to the food sector, and it is not without reason that Israel is an important player in the global food-tech industry.”

Dr. Avi Shpigelman, also of the Faculty of Biotechnology and Food Engineering, and one of the lecturers of EIT FAN at the Technion, said, “the uniqueness of the program lies in the integration of knowledge and skills from the academic world and industry, and in the program’s location within the Faculty, which also places its advanced infrastructure at the participants’ disposal.”  

According to Dr. Avital Regev Siman-Tov, director of the program in Israel, “The program reflects the spirit of the Israeli startup nation and the knowledge it has accumulated and exposes participants to a unique combination of lectures, practical workshops, mentors and leading industry experts. In fact, the program we crafted at the Technion together with Strauss has become one of the cornerstones of the European acceleration program, which will soon be beginning its fourth year of activity.”

This is the second time in the three years that the winner of the prestigious EIT-FAN finals is a participant of the program at the Technion. In the program’s first year it was Redefine Meat – an Israeli company that developed a 3D meat printing technology to creating animal-free “whole muscle” cuts of meat (e.g. steaks) with the appearance, texture, and flavor of real meat, but made from natural plant-based sustainable materials. Redefine Meat’s CEO, Eshchar Ben-Shitrit, said participation in EIT-FAN at the Technion and winning the competition were a significant milestone in the company’s development, fundraising, and team growth.

Israeli start-up H2PRO was named “best company in the scale-up track” in the international New Energy Challenge competition, a prestigious event organized annually by Royal Dutch Shell. H2PRO was founded based on an innovative green energy technology invented at Technion-Israel Institute of Technology that produces hydrogen efficiently, inexpensively, and safely. 

H2PRO was one of just five finalists in the 2020 competition. In addition to being the youngest company on the list, it was also the only one from Israel. H2PRO’s innovative technology heralds a new era of green hydrogen production by splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen using electrical power. Traditional electrolysis produces hydrogen and oxygen simultaneously, which requires a membrane to separate them. The use of a membrane makes the system and the process significantly more expensive. Green hydrogen is an alternative fuel that can replace oil and natural gas in the long term. It plays a critical role in the reduction of polluting vehicle emissions, as well as in clean production of materials and chemicals, heating and storing renewable energy.

The new technology renders the membrane unnecessary, since the two gases are produced at different stages. The technology also increases energy efficiency by 20-25% compared to the alternatives; significantly improves the safety of the production process; reduces the cost of building the system to approximately one half; and increases the pressure of the produced hydrogen, thereby reducing the cost of downstream hydrogen compression.

H2PRO was founded in 2019 by Technion researchers Professor Gideon Grader (Faculty of Chemical Engineering), Professor Avner Rothschild, and Dr. Hen Dotan (Faculty of Materials Science and Engineering), in collaboration with the founders of Viber, which is headed by entrepreneur Talmon Marco.

The company received an exclusive license to commercialize the technology from T3, Technion’s technology transfer unit. To date, it has raised capital from Hyundai, Sumitomo, and Bazan, and from private investors and funds. The research that led to the establishment of H2PRO was supported by the Nancy and Stephen Grand Technion Energy Program (GTEP), a donation by businessman and Technion supporter Ed Satell, the Adelis Foundation, Israel’s Ministry of Energy and the European Commission (the EU’s 2020 program). The research was conducted together with Dr. Avigail Landman, who was a Ph.D. student of both Prof. Rothschild and Prof. Grader.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s6ISMgT9kYE&feature=youtu.be

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The Technion – Israel Institute of Technology launches the Schulich Leaders Entrepreneurship Program with 15 outstanding students from various faculties.

The Technion – Israel Institute of Technology has launched the Schulich Leaders Entrepreneurship Program, a new flagship program for outstanding students. The 15 pioneers of the Technion program, male and female students in various faculties, will participate in the opening ceremony of the national program, which will take place online today, Thursday, November 19. The ceremony will be attended by members of the Schulich family, Education Minister Yoav Galant, Senior Executive Vice President of the Technion Professor Oded Rabinovitch, Vice President for External Relations and Resource Development Professor Alon Wolf, and Uri Karmi, the director of the Schulich Foundation in Israel. The professional lecture at the event will be delivered by Waze founder Uri Levine.

“Entrepreneurship is a way of life for us at the Technion, and it is deeply ingrained in our organizational DNA,” said Technion President Professor Uri Sivan. “Many reality-changing developments that emerged from the Technion affected the lives of millions in Israel and around the world. We put a lot of effort into instilling these entrepreneurial values and spirit in all of our students. The Schulich Entrepreneurial Leadership program will now become the highlight of all these efforts and enable the future generation of entrepreneurs in Israel to be nurtured and trained. I thank the Schulich Foundation from the bottom of my heart for the shared vision and expression of trust.”

The new Entrepreneurship program, which will commence this year at the Technion, will provide its participants with an entrepreneurial toolbox and guidance in developing an idea for practical development. According to the head of the program, Professor Daniella Raveh from the Faculty of Aerospace Engineering, “Every year 15 students will join the program, and each will receive generous support and close guidance on leadership and involvement issues. This is a small, high-quality group of students whose influence will reach far beyond the program’s borders. we intend for the participants in the ‘Schulich Leaders’ program to become the flag bearers of entrepreneurship, innovation, and leadership at the Technion.”

Canadian entrepreneur and philanthropist Seymour Schulich, heads the Schulich family, who has to date donated some $350 million to various causes, most of them in higher education and health in Canada, the United States, and Israel. The partnership between the Schulichs and the Technion has been ongoing for over a decade and began with the Schulich Faculty of Chemistry and the Schulich Leader Scholarships, the most prestigious scholarship program in Israel that has been operating at the Technion until this year.

The Schulich Leaders Entrepreneurship program will provide its participants with generous support that includes a living scholarship of NIS 25,000 per year and a tuition scholarship.

“Since its inception, the Technion has been a source of technological innovation whose impact can be seen all over the world,” said Uri Karmi, director of the Schulich Foundation in Israel. “We hope and look forward to seeing the graduates of the program continue in this tradition, building successful companies and producing positive change in the world.”

The first group of students in the program includes Itay Nakash, Shir Barkan, Liad Perl, Adi Makhoul, Haneen Naaran, Harel Mendelman, Michal Maymon, Elia Suleimanov, Roni Ashkenazy, Ron Hudadi, Asaf Aaronson, Roy Levy, Hilel Sahar, Rotem Elimelech, and Nitzan Mashall.

Click here to get to know them. 

 

 

50New technology developed by the Technion and Embryonics is expected to dramatically improve IVF success rates. The article is published on the 43rd anniversary of the first IVF procedure

Forty-three years ago, on November 10, 1977, an in-vitro fertilization (IVF) procedure in humans was undertaken for the first time in history. Eight and a half months later, the world’s first test-tube baby, Louise Joy Brown, was born, and September 1982 saw the birth of the first test-tube baby in Israel, Romy Neumark. In 2010, when 28-year-old Neumark was already a well-known anchor on Channel 10 News, one of the pioneers of the method, Prof. Robert Edwards of Cambridge University, was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine.

In-vitro fertilization is in many cases the only solution available to future parents such as single moms, same-sex couples, couples suffering from genetic disorders of the reproductive system, and others. In the procedure, the woman undergoes a treatment that increases the number of ova (eggs), the mature eggs are retrieved from the ovaries and are fertilized by the man’s sperm in the laboratory. Several days later, after the fertilized eggs have become embryos, some of these embryos are implanted in the woman’s uterus.

Despite the importance of IVF, success rates remain below 40%. This is due, among other things, to the right selection of the embryos that will be implanted in the uterus – a process that is still performed manually by the embryologist and without any clear, uniform criteria.

This picture is likely to change dramatically thanks to Ubar – an innovative technology developed by researchers of the Taub Faculty of Computer Science at the Technion and Embryonics. The technology, which betters the selection of embryos and raises it to unprecedented levels, is now presented on the website of MIDL – the Medical Imaging with Deep Learning Conference – in an article published in an open peer review. The technology was developed by Prof. Alex Bronstein of the Taub Faculty of Computer Science and Embryonics founders David Silver, who studied at the Technion in the Rothschild Scholars Program for Excellence, and Dr. Yael Gold-Zamir, the company’s CEO.

In the article, the researchers describe a novel data-driven system that is expected to dramatically improve successful outcomes of embryo implantation, as evidenced by time-lapse imaging videos. The study is based on 8,789 such videos, of which verified data on the success of the pregnancy exists with regard to 272 embryos. The automatic system’s predictions were compared to predictions by an expert panel of embryologists, who are experienced in this field, and Ubar demonstrated a dramatic improvement in embryo selection, with a 12% increase in positive predictive values (success of the procedure) and a 29% increase in negative predictive values (rejection of embryos due to low implantation probability).

The study was supported by the Israel Innovation Authority.

Source

Researchers at the Technion Faculty of Biology have discovered protein channelrhodopsins, acquired and evolved from algae into giant viruses that infect them

Researchers at the Technion Faculty of Biology have for the first time discovered unique photoreceptors in marine giant viruses and the algae they infect. The study, published in Current Biology, was performed by lead researcher Professor Oded Béjà and postdoctoral researcher Dr. Andrey Rozenberg.

Prof. Béjà’s research team studies microbial rhodopsins, proteins that help unicellular organisms to harvest light energy (in a process that differs from photosynthesis) and also detect light in a way remotely similar to animal vision. This study focused on the family of the light-activated ion channels called channelrhodopsins (ChRs), microbial rhodopsins that directly translate absorbed light into ion fluxes across cellular membranes. These proteins, which naturally originate in unicellular algae, are used in neuroscience as the main optogenetic tool for precise manipulation – stimulation and inhibition – of neurons and other excitable cells, through the use of light. Optogenetics has caused a revolution in neuroscience research and today is considered to be the best method for activating specific cells to examine their impact on the functioning of the organism.

Channelrhodopsins, which were first discovered as green algal proteins localized to the so-called eyespots, help the proteins find optimal light conditions by driving their phototaxis. Diverse channelrhodopsins have been discovered in recent years in other unicellular algae and also non-photosynthetic single-cell organisms.

The Technion’s research team, which performed a metagenomic analysis of seawater, has now found that viruses that infect algae contain genes coding for channelrhodopsins. The search for related proteins brought about the discovery of a whole new family of channelrhodopsins that originated in “primitive” green algae and anion-conducting activity that originated in algae. Through electrophysiological experiments, they demonstrated that the channelrhodopsins from the viruses and the algae function as anion-conducting light-dependent channels.

According to Prof. Béjà, “Our quest led us to the conclusion that the origin of these channelrhodopsins is not in the virus but in the algae that they infect, and we estimate that at some point in the evolutionary process, a giant alga-infecting virus “stole” a channelrhodopsin gene for its own benefit.  We hypothesize that the viruses can manipulate the host’s swimming behavior, thus controlling its light responses and directing it to locations where irradiation conditions are favorable for the virus.”

The study is based on data collected in Tara Oceans, a global oceanic research expedition undertaken to collect samples for mapping marine biodiversity, which traveled on board the vessel Tara.

The research project was carried out in collaboration with Professor Peter Hegemann of Humboldt University of Berlin, Germany, and his team.

For the article in Current Biology click here   

For the first time, the Minister of Science and Technology and representatives of the United Arab Emirates participated in the final event of the BizTEC Entrepreneurship Program at the Technion.  Since the program’s founding in 2004, its graduates have raised more than $750 million.

Dr. Gilad Rosenblatt and Dr. Boris Simkhovich, who completed their degrees at the Technion, are the first-place winners of the BizTEC 2020 program.  The decision was announced at the recent final event, which was held online. The two developed LightCode – an innovative technology that accelerates drug discovery by identifying the potential of small molecules to be used in new drugs.

The BizTEC Entrepreneurship program currently operates as part of t-hub – the Technion’s Entrepreneurship and Innovation Center, which is headed by Professor Ezri Tarazi. The program fosters novice entrepreneur who are seeking to develop deep technologies that require interdisciplinary collaboration and in-depth knowledge infrastructure and provides participating teams close professional guidance of mentors from academia and industry. In the 16 years of the program’s existence, its graduates have raised more than $750 million and founded many successful companies, including Houseparty, Breezometer, Via Surgica, Gusto, Augmedics, VocalisHealth, and Windward.

This year, despite the coronavirus crisis, the program saw a record number of participants: 110 students and graduates began the program, some 80% of whom were from the Technion. Approximately 30 passed to the semifinals – most of them graduate students at the Technion. The proportion of women in the program increased to 28% and the organizers believe that this trend will continue in the coming years.

“The Coronavirus crisis has brought scientific research and technology back to the forefront and to the public discourse,” said Technion President Prof. Uri Sivan, who opened the event. “Crises of the kind we are experiencing now bring with them not only difficulties but also new opportunities and directions. They challenge paradigms and take us all out of our comfort zone; this is the time for creativity and innovation. They say the need is the mother of all invention. The coronavirus crisis has led to dozens of groundbreaking studies at the Technion, some of which have even matured within a few months into technological commercialization and the establishment of new start-up companies.”

Minister of Science and Technology Izhar Shay was a guest at the event. A graduate of the Viterbi Faculty of Electrical Engineering at the Technion, he is an entrepreneur and investor who developed the entrepreneur’s platform “Startup Stadium” and is included in the list of 70 exemplary people in Israeli high-tech. “I was one of the first investors in BizTEC and it is exciting to see the continuity of the program and the successes of its graduates,” the minister said. On the agreement with the United Arab Emirates, Shay said that his office promotes cooperation with the Emirates and with Bahrain and that he hopes this will lead to the integration of forces between entrepreneurs from Israel and these two countries.

The event was also attended by representatives from the UAE, including Shrikant Tucker from the Emirati Innovation Authority. Investor Hasan Sleem, an Oxford and Cambridge graduate, congratulated those present and said, “I do not need an introduction regarding the Technion. Twelve years ago, I met an Israeli entrepreneur in London who founded one of the companies I run today. He is a graduate of the Technion – his father taught physics at the Technion and also his partner is a graduate of the Technion – so I know the Technion well. BizTEC is one of the best technology programs in Israel, and it was founded in 2004 – the year I founded Privity, a venture capital consulting firm. So that we are the same age.”

Hassan presented his life with six flags: Pakistan, where his parents were born; Fiji, where he was born; Nigeria, where he grew up; Britain, where he studied at Oxford and Cambridge; Japan – the first country to offer him a job; and the United Arab Emirates, where he works today. He said: “Now, following recent developments in the region, it seems that two parallel lines have met and led to the signing of the agreement between Israel and the United Arab Emirates on September 15, 2020. I hope new possibilities for cooperation between us and other entrepreneurs will emerge from t-hub, the Technion’s Entrepreneurship Center.”

The BizTEC program is currently run by Ohad Yaniv, who also hosted the event. “The BizTEC program is an elite unit in the field of entrepreneurship programs in the world in general and in the Israeli ecosystem in particular,” he said. It is very rare that there are so many successes coming out of a program designed for projects at very early stages (sometimes entrepreneurs only arrive with an idea only without a presentation). The reasons for this lie in the strong back that the Technion knows to provide entrepreneurs in the program, in the vast experience gained in working with early-stage projects (the program is one of the oldest in the world in the field) and in creating a challenging track that only the most determined entrepreneurs complete. This is a very significant validation for investors who want to know where to put their money. I would like to thank the mentors, judges, lecturers, friends, and partners of the firm Pearl Cohen, Poalim-Tech, the Rothschild Foundation, and especially Yehuda and Dita Bronicki for their backing, contribution, time, and guidance of the competition over the years.”

Along with the winning development, LightCode, the developments of the following groups were presented at the event: A-chord (second place) – early detection of an outbreak in schizophrenia patients; Harmony (third place) – wearable monitoring device that monitors hormone levels in blood of women undergoing IVF treatment; FootVices – technology for walking rehabilitation; SoundFlow – monitoring significant changes in blood flow in blood vessels; A-Lectio – an open knowledge library that connects members of the scientific community on a digital platform, allowing them to create and consume knowledge and manage it; EasyLine – a new catheterization technology that significantly reduces the failure rates in such surgeries; Experium – a wearable system that reduces the exposure of medical staff to airborne viruses and bacteria; and WatchAfter – technology for the automatic detection of child abuse in kindergartens and preschools.

The science behind the winner

The first-place winners, Gilad Rosenblatt and Boris Simkhovich, developed LightCode – an innovative technology that accelerates drug discovery by identifying the potential of small molecules to be used in new drugs. Developing a new drug takes about a decade and requires an investment of billions of dollars. Despite this, about 90% of the drugs that reach clinical development stages “fall” on the way to the market. The high failure rates lead to a low return on investment and drive the very high prices of new drugs.

The majority of drugs are based on small molecules that bind to proteins in the body. Therefore, one of the major challenges in drug development is the identification of molecules that will desirably bind to those proteins. The problem is that the number of potential molecules is greater than the number of stars in the sky, so to find a suitable molecule sometimes requires screening about a million molecules. 

In recent years, a new approach to drug discovery has been emerging, and it is based on fragments – very small molecules that serve as chemical building blocks that make up the drug molecule. This approach holds that the right choice of fragments will allow the creation of a drug molecule with higher success rates while cutting development costs and time. Thus emerged the need to characterize those fragments and identify their potential to bind to the target protein. However, because fragments are very small, their molecular binding interactions with the protein are weak and hard to detect.

The devices that do this today are divided into those that provide high-throughput results (many tests at a given time) but with limited reliability, and those that provide accurate but low-rate results (for example magnetic resonance devices).

The combination of speed and accuracy in the same device is a huge challenge that encounters many obstacles. This is the challenge that the new system solves.

The development of Rosenblatt and Simkhovich is based on the discoveries of unique light waves occurring in nanostructures. The discovery, made as part of Rosenblatt’s doctoral dissertation, matured into a prototype system through collaboration between the two. Following an initial proof of feasibility, they received financial assistance from the Israeli Innovation Authority for the purpose of building the system and transformed the fundamental science achievements into a viable technology.

Both are “full” Technion graduates. Simkhovich completed a bachelor’s and master’s degree in physics at the Technion, after which he worked in the semiconductor industry, and a doctorate in nanotechnology under the supervision of Professor Guy Bartel.

Rosenblatt completed a triple bachelor’s degree – electrical engineering, physics, and mathematics – and master’s and doctoral degrees in the Andrew and Erna Viterbi Faculty of Electrical Engineering under the supervision of Professor Meir Orenstein. The two met during their doctorates, after which they began working together in Prof. Orenstein’s research group and published an article in the prestigious journal Physical Review X.

“The Technion shaped my professional and intellectual life,” said Rosenblatt, “and the connection with Boris was excellent both professionally and personally – for example in mountain climbing together. We have come a long way together and learned that new things can be created from arguments and disagreements.”

According to Simkhovich, “The BizTEC program suited us really well during this period, when we were already in the midst of proving practical feasibility. The program has advanced us a lot and provided us with very important tools that help us translate the development into a business platform.”

Rosenblatt noted that, “Ohad Yaniv’s dedication and commitment to the event, and to the program in general, were above and beyond, and this is evident in the success of the program.”

Hundreds of students recently received scholarships totaling NIS 1.7 million ($502,000 U.S.) through Technion’s Dean of Students Office. Valued at thousands of shekels each, the scholarships were granted with the support of Technion, the Technion Alumni Association, Technion Friends Societies in Israel and around the world, and external entities that included the Council for Higher Education’s Planning and Budgetary Committee and the Moshe Meir Horowitz z”l Foundation managed by KKL-JNF. The special emergency assistance scholarships will help students who are struggling with the challenges and ensuing financial hardships of the COVID-19 era.

“My family and I are experiencing very tough times, and this scholarship will help me a lot this year and will keep me on track. One day I hope to be in your shoes – Technion alumni who are now donating scholarships to students – helping people in the position I am in today,” said N., a 22-year-old student who is starting her 4th year in the Faculty of Civil and Environmental Engineering, when she received the news that Technion approved her request for a “coronavirus scholarship.” I’m very happy to be studying at Technion, a university that always supports its students in every way and in every situation.” 

In addition to the scholarships, Technion also substantially expanded the scope of its student support by establishing an emergency loan fund. Every student can receive up to NIS 20,000 ($5,917 US), with no questions asked and regardless of socioeconomic status, to be repaid interest-free and without linkage after the completion of their studies, and even then in a gradual manner. To date, the fund has helped hundreds of students with loans totaling more than NIS 2.5 million ($740,000 US). 

Technion also enabled students to defer tuition payments for the Spring semester. and avoided fining those who terminated their dormitory rental contract prematurely because of COVID-19-related disruptions. 

“We are intent on guaranteeing that the coronavirus crisis will not disrupt the continuity of any student’s studies at Technion,” said Technion President Professor Uri Sivan. “During this academic year as well, we will continue to support students through scholarships, loans, and other channels thanks to the help of Technion’s friends in Israel and around the world, and thanks to an additional emergency budget from the Council of Higher Education’s Planning and Budgetary Committee. The support our students are receiving at this time from our friends around the world imbues new meaning to the phrase “the Technion family.’”

According to Technion’s Dean of Students Professor Ayelet Fishman, “the hardships triggered by the pandemic generated an exceptionally large number of requests for financial aid and for dormitory space. We granted the scholarships according to clearly defined and consistent criteria. Now we are trying to raise funds to help students who are slightly below the acceptance threshold.”

Demand for dorms also exceeds the supply, and here too, Technion is actively seeking the best possible solutions. In recent years, Technion has invested enormous resources in order to increase the dormitory space available to students, and today it is the leading university in Israel as regards students living on campus.

Among the donors to the current student aid campaign, there is one married couple that stands out: Tal Allon, Director of the Hod HaCarmel School for Excellence in Science, and his wife Karin Rosenthal decided to donate the “Coronavirus grants” they received from the government to Technion’s students. 

Sigal First, Chair of the Technion Alumni Association, explained: “Tal Allon approached us with a request to donate his and his wife’s government grants in order to fund student scholarships. They inspired the Technion Alumni Association to launch a campaign to encourage people to donate their government coronavirus grants. We have already succeeded in raising tens of thousands of shekels donated by different generations of Technion graduates on behalf of current students. The Alumni Association constantly strives to strengthen the connection between Technion graduates and students, and the term ‘Technion family’ is always on our minds. The family’s strength is measured in days of hardship and we invite all alumni to contribute to this initiative.”

The Technion Friends Society in Israel is also part of this effort. “We would like to thank Technion’s friends in Israel who are donating to Technion’s emergency fund for students in need,” said Professor Peretz Lavie, Chair of the Technion Friends Society in Israel. “The generosity of our friends during these difficult times of economic uncertainty is a great source of pride and appreciation. Without their help, many students would have had to abandon their studies.”

 

Suicide is a significant cause of death in Israel and around the world, with approximately one million suicides worldwide annually, of which about 500 occur in Israel. Although it is not a leading cause of death among the general population, it is the number one cause for young people under the age of 24. 

Social, psychological, and psychiatric help are effective tools in preventing suicides, but are only applied in cases where the problem has been diagnosed and the person is receiving treatment. As a result, it is important to recognize suicidal tendencies in the general population. This is an extremely complex challenge since medical information related to mental health is protected by confidentiality protocols, and many at-risk people do not seek help.

In the last 50 years, a great deal of research has been devoted to developing models for early detection of people at a real risk of committing suicide. The problem is that until now these models were based on traditional statistical methods and provided predictions that were about as accurate as chance-level predictions. 

A new study by researchers from Technion and Hebrew University portends a breakthrough in this field. Published in Scientific Reports, a Nature Publishing Group journal, the research was carried out by Technion scientists Professor  Roi Reichart, who is an expert in natural language processing, Ph.D.student Refael Tikochinski (computational psychology), and postdoctoral researcher Dr. Yaakov Ophir (clinical psychology, a joint appointment with the Hebrew University) and, along with Hebrew University scientists Professor Christa Asterhan (Educational Psychology) and Dr. Itay Sisso (cognition and Big Data).

The tools developed by the group enable early detection of at-risk populations within the overall population so that the detection is not limited to people already being treated for mental health issues.

The system combines machine learning and natural language processing with theoretical and analytical tools from the realm of psychology and psychiatry and uses layered neural networks.

According to Prof. Reichart, “We now understand that detecting suicidal tendencies cannot depend only on explicit expressions of distress (such as: “I want to die”) or on official medical records such as physiological data from brain scans, psychiatric evaluations, and other data from medical files. Attempts to predict suicide attempts based on demographic, psychological, and medical data have not been particularly successful despite five decades of intensive research. Therefore, we realized that we had to approach the challenge from different directions simultaneously.” 

According to Dr. Ophir, the idea for the research was born following the tragic death of David-El Mizrachi, a 16-year-old who committed suicide because he was bullied online and in person. “It quickly became apparent that detecting suicidal tendencies early enough requires interdisciplinary research that includes researchers from different fields. That is how this multi-university and the multi-disciplinary group was formed.”

The researchers discovered that people with real suicidal tendencies rarely use explicitly alarming words in their posts (such as “death,” “kill” or “suicide”). More often, they use negative descriptive words (”bad,” “worst”), curse words (“f***ing,” “b**ch”), expressions of emotional distress (“sad,” “hurt,” “cry,” “mad”), and descriptions of negative physiological states (“sick,” “pain,” “surgery,” “hospital”). People who do not have suicidal tendencies tend to express more positive emotions and experiences, and more references to religion and positive outlooks on life – a correlation that matches many studies that identified these factors as representing immunity to mental and emotional distress. 

Altogether, the researchers analyzed more than 80,000 Facebook posts written by adults in the U.S., comparing their language usage patterns with their scores on a wide range of valid psychological indices. “The power of the natural language processing-based algorithm lies in its ability to analyze enormous quantities of linguistic clues – something that humans are not able to do,” explained Refael Tikochinski. “In this project, we integrated cutting-edge attention-based neural network modeling for text representation, with layered neural networks for classification.”

Prof. Asterhan added that: “This research has very important applications for identifying people in distress and providing help on time. Furthermore, it demonstrates the strength of intensive multidisciplinary collaboration and of combining advanced knowledge from the social sciences and data sciences. On the one hand, using advanced computational techniques has opened up new research opportunities in the social sciences that were hitherto not possible. On the other hand, the substantial improvement in precision rates was obtained when psychopathological knowledge and data was embedded in the computational models.” 

“I have a problem with clichés,” concluded Dr. Ophir, “but in this case I believe that, at the end of the day, the breakthrough we achieved is capable of saving lives. I hope that this research is a harbinger of hope in the field of mental health.”

Link to the scientific article: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-73917-0

Rabbi Lord Johnathan Sacks, an international religious leader, philosopher, and award-winning author who served as Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth from 1991 to 2013 passed away at the age of 73. 

In 2018, the Technion awarded Rabbi Sacks an honorary doctorate “In honor of his decades-long contribution to the preservation of traditional Jewish faith and to the enrichment of Jewish identity; in homage to his stature as an international religious leader and a respected moral voice in the world; and with feelings of gratitude for his steadfast devotion to the State of Israel and the Jewish people.” 

 

 

At the Technion Honorary Doctorate Award Ceremony, Rabbi Sacks delivered an address on behalf of all of the honorary awardees. He referred to what a great honor it was to receive an honorary doctorate from the institute that developed a drug for Parkinson’s disease, achieved breakthroughs in information technology, and lead the development of the Iron Dome system. He continued that, Israel had demonstrated how to be 70 years old, or nearly 4,000 years old as was the case with the Jewish people, and remain young. He was of the view that part of Israel’s ability to remain young rested with the Technion, as it was a living exemplar of “social reformation”, of reconstituting a fragmented world. It did so he said, “by virtue of its position at the heart of Israel’s high-tech economy, the “start-up nation”.  Every technological innovation that can be traced back to Israel – whether it be medical technology, nanotechnology, agricultural technology, or information technology – has enhanced peoples’ lives.” 

Within the framework of the 2018 Board of Governors Meeting, Rabbi Sacks and Nobel Laureate Distinguished Professor Aaron Ciechanover from Technion’s Rappaport Faculty of Medicine held a public dialogue on the topic “Does G-d Play Dice?” – click here to view the event.     

May his memory be for a blessing.  

Researchers at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology have developed a new light source based on a single atomic layer. The discovery is based on the interaction of a single atomic layer with nano-antenna arrays in a silicon chip by creating defects in photonic crystals. Published in the journal Nature Nanotechnology, the development enables the control of the spin of emitted photons from two-dimensional matter and paves the way for new photonic devices based on “atomic scale spin-optics.”

The study was conducted in the research group of Professor Erez Hasman, head of the Atomic-Scale Photonics Laboratory, in collaboration with Professor Elad Koren, head of the Laboratory for Nanoscale Electronic Materials and Devices in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering. Both groups are associated with the Helen Diller Quantum Center and Russell Berrie Nanotechnology Institute. Dr. Kexiu Rong and Dr. Bo Wang conducted and led the research, and collaborated with Dr. Elhanan Magid, Dr. Vladimir Kleiner, Avi Reuven, Bar Cohn, and Shaul Katznelson.

What are two-dimensional materials? According to Prof. Koren, “In 2004, the possibility of creating a single atomic layer was first examined when physicists Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov, later Nobel Laureates in Physics (2010), developed a simple method for creating individual layers of carbon atoms. The two attached adhesive paper to a piece of graphite and peeled the material layer by layer until a single layer of atoms called graphene was obtained. They also showed that the atomic layer of matter is very different in its properties from the properties of matter in its three-dimensional form. This is a material 100 times stronger than steel and with exceptional electrical properties, and according to estimates it is expected to revolutionize conductors and semiconductors, monitors and screens, solar cells, and more. Following this discovery, atomic layers were developed from other materials, and they similarly exhibit surprising and unique properties.”

Professor Hasman added and elucidated that, “As a result of the discovery of graphene, many two-dimensional materials have been discovered and studied, such as various semiconductors that make it possible to obtain interesting optical properties. Standard electronic chips are based on silicon, which severely limits the development of the next generation of computers that require a combination of electronics and photonics, partly due to a lack of an essential condition called ‘direct energy gap’ in silicon. To our surprise, direct energy gap was discovered in two-dimensional semiconductors, which makes it possible to combine photonics and electronics at the nanometric scale, use them to produce light sources and active photonic devices, and pave the way for future generations of chips.”

To miniaturize the electronic chip and significantly increase the processing speed and information transfer rate, the currently accepted approach is spintronics – performing operations on a spin, an important property characterizing the intrinsic rotation of electrons – and not on the current of electrons. In 2001, Prof. Hasman established a new field called spin-optics, which makes it possible to utilize the spin of photons using meta-surfaces for the purpose of transmitting and processing information in photonic chips. The transfer of information is based on the control of photonic spin with the help of nano photonics, optics at the nanometer scale. The semiconductor materials, due to the broken inversion symmetry of their structures, possess electron energy levels, characterized by a new degree of freedom – valley – that can control spin-selective light emission. Technion researchers decided to take advantage of this feature, creating an interaction of a single atomic layer of Tungsten Selenide (WSe2) with nano antennas that allow symmetry in the photonic spin to be broken. This will result in an atomic scale chip that controls and processes valley information via the photonic spin.

The researchers developed a two-dimensional photonic crystal structure made of silicon that creates an energy gap in the emission spectrum of the two-dimensional material so that the coupling of the atomic semiconductor to the photonic crystal blocks all optical emission channels from the two-dimensional material. By creating smart defects within the photonic crystal, controlling the phase of the defects with their geometry, and coupling between them, the researchers created a light source from a single atomic layer that separates and sorts the spins of the photons emitted from the two-dimensional semiconductor. This discovery will make it possible to combine spintronics and spin-optics to develop a wide range of devices on an atomic scale.

Prof. Hasman proudly noted that: “this prestigious publication shows the importance of multidisciplinary research that combines physics, chemistry, materials science, and engineering.”

The research was supported by the Israel Science Foundation (ISF), the Israel Ministry of Science, Technology and Space, the U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research and, in part, by the Technion via an Aly Kaufman Fellowship. The fabrication was performed at the Micro-Nano Fabrication & Printing Unit (MNF&PU) of the Technion.
Laboratory sites: https://hasman.technion.ac.il/    https://koren.net.technion.ac.il/

 

Click here for the paper in Nature Nanotechnology

A paper titled, “BebopNet: Deep Neural Models for Personalized Jazz Improvisation” was recently presented at the 21st International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference (ISMIR 2020) and received the Best Research Award. Authored by M.Sc. students Nadav Bhonker (already graduated) and Shunit Haviv Hakimi, and by their advisor, Professor Ran El-Yaniv at the Henry and Marilyn Taub Faculty of Computer Science at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, the paper indicates that it is possible to model and optimize personalized jazz preferences.

Learning to generate music is an ongoing AI challenge. An even more difficult task is the creation of musical pieces that match human-specific preferences. In the BebopNet project, Bhonker and Haviv Hakimi, both amateur jazz musicians, focused on personalized, symbol-based, monophonic generation of harmony-constrained jazz improvisations. To tackle this objective, they introduced a pipeline consisting of several steps: supervised learning using a corpus of solos (a language model), high-resolution user preference metric learning, and optimized generation using planning (beam search). The corpus consisted of hundreds of original jazz solos performed by saxophone giants including Charlie Parker, Stan Getz, Sonny Stitt, and Dexter Gordon. They presented an extensive empirical study in which they applied this pipeline to extract individual models as implicitly defined by several human listeners. This approach enables an objective examination of subjective personalized models whose performance is quantifiable. 

A plagiarism analysis was also performed to ensure that the generated solos are genuine rather than a concatenation of phrases previously seen in the corpus. “While our computer-generated solos are locally coherent and often interesting or pleasing, they lack the qualities of professional jazz solos related to general structure such as motif development and variations,” said the authors. 

Prof. El-Yaniv hopes to overcome this challenge in future research. Preliminary models based on a smaller dataset were substantially weaker, and it is possible that a larger dataset would make a substantially better model. In order to obtain such a large corpus, it might be necessary to abandon the symbolic approach and rely on audio recordings which can be gathered in much larger quantities.

“Perhaps one of the main bottlenecks in AI art generation, including jazz improvisation, is how to evaluate quality meaningfully.  Our work emphasizes the need to develop effective methodologies and techniques to extract and distill noisy human feedback that will be required for effective quality evaluation of personalized AI art. Such techniques are key to developing many cool applications,” noted Prof. El-Yaniv.

Click here for the paper 

Click here for Audio Samples