Month: August 2022

“It is basically a ‘therapeutic cancer vaccine’,” Prof. Arie Admon from the Technion Faculty of Biology explains the mechanism behind the immunotherapy cancer treatment that is the focus of his lab. “It activates the body’s own immune system against the tumor.” Immunotherapy treatments are coming to prominence in recent years, surpassing traditional chemotherapy in its ability to treat more than one type of cancer. Prof. Admon aims to increase the scope of cancers that can be treated by immunotherapy, and to reduce the treatment’s cost. The work of his Ph.D. student Sofia Khazan-Kost, recently published in Journal for Immunotherapy in Cancer (JITC) does just that.

Khazan-Kost’s study, an initiative of Dr. Michael Peled, senior physician at Sheba Medical Center, focused on lung cancer patients. Lung cancer is the most common cause of cancer-related death in both men and women, killing over 1.5 million people around the world annually. Khazan-Kost developed and proved the effectiveness of a simple technique to collect patient-specific tumor peptides that would improve matching the precise treatment to each individual patient. The peptides, which are short bits of protein, were collected from the pleural effusion of lung cancer patients – from liquid discharge that amasses in the patients’ chest and needs to be routinely removed, as it restricts breathing. This liquid would normally be disposed of. Khazan-Kost’s technique, therefore, doesn’t subject the patient to any additional tests, but makes use of “trash”.

Our cells routinely present on their surface, with the help of molecules called HLA, bits and pieces of the proteins (peptides) degraded inside. It is one of the ways each cell communicates to its environment what goes on inside it. This communication becomes important when the cell is infected by a virus, in which case it will display small pieces of viral proteins; or, if the cell turns cancerous, in which case various peptides from aberrant proteins will be displayed. The immune system, seeing these, is supposed to attack and destroy the cell, protecting the body from the disease.

A vaccine, such as the Coronavirus vaccine we’ve become familiar with, induces the immune system to peptides from the bacteria or virus it’s supposed to protect against, in this way “training” it and improving its response. A cancer vaccine is intended to work similarly, training the immune system to attack cancer cells. However, unlike bacteria and viruses, cancer is not an intruder in the body that can be easily “shown” to the immune system. It is an abnormality that occurs within the cells of the body. The aberrant peptides that the diseased cell presents can thus be as different between patients as one patient is from another. This makes generating a vaccine to help multiple patients an extremely complicated task.

The key to Khazan-Kost’s technique are the HLA molecules that present the aforementioned peptides on the cell surface. These molecules, have some variation between people, and are in fact key to transplant organ matching. They are located in the outer membrane of almost every cell in the body, and are also, together with the peptide cargo they carry, released by the cells into the different body fluids, such as blood and the lymph. In advanced stage lung cancer patients, they also find their way into the pleural effusion. Researchers have tried to use HLA molecules isolated from the cancer cells to acquire tumor-specific peptides for immunotherapy development. However, the quantity of such molecules in a tumor needle biopsy was found to be insufficient. Pleural effusions, which need to be removed from the patient’s lungs as part of treatment, provided the needed access point.

Prof. Admon’s team were able to filter out a large amount of HLA molecules from patients’ pleural effusions, and then used mass spectrometry analysis to identify the peptides that the HLA molecules presented. Using this information, they were able to reconstruct the aberrant tumor-specific proteins. These, they showed, can be used for research, for matching existing treatments to patients, and in the future – to initiate the kind of immune response one would want in a vaccine.

“Patients who suffer from pleural effusions secondary to cancer are in late stages of the disease,” Dr. Peled explains. “In those stages, the tumor is inoperable due to metastasis. This is the reason there’s no sufficient tissue to analyze. We hope that our ability to obtain tumor peptides from pleural effusions can lead to novel avenues of treatment for late-stage cancer.”

This is the first time that pleural effusions are put to the scientific use of identifying their repertoires of HLA-bound peptides. The same method used by Khazan-Kost and her colleagues, who focused on cancer, could also be used to diagnose and study other diseases that produce such effusions.

This study was supported by the Israel Science Foundation (ISF) and the Israel Cancer Association.

Prof. Hossam Haick of the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology has won three prestigious European research grants totaling 4.2 million euros for his research group. He will also serve as chairman and coordinator of one of the projects that has 22 partners and a total funding of 14 million euros. Winning the grants was preceded by intensive work by the members of Prof. Haick’s research group — the administrative manager of the group Liat Tsuri, and Dr. Rotem Vishinkin, a scientific researcher and project manager.

This is an unprecedented achievement by Prof. Haick, a faculty member at the Wolfson Faculty of Chemical Engineering and the Russell Berrie Nanotechnology Institute (RBNI). Prof. Haick also currently serves as the Dean of Undergraduate studies at the Technion and is an expert in the field of nanotechnology and non-invasive disease diagnosis.

The grants are awarded within the framework of the Horizon Europe program, which supports consortia that produce cooperation among many entities in the European Union while focusing on practical solutions to the challenges of the time – all based on innovative technologies whose development demands extensive international cooperation.

“This is an extraordinary achievement by Prof. Hossam Haick,” said Dr. Asi Cohen-Dotan, Head of the Technion R&D Foundation’s Research Promotion Unit. “Prof. Haick continues to lead successes in very competitive tracks in the European research programs, while performing a significant organizational role.” This year, the Technion succeeded in increasing both the number of grants it receives from this program and their financial range, which has made it a noteworthy player in European activity in applied research.

U.S. Ambassador to Israel Thomas R. Nides visited the Technion as part of a tour of Haifa. The ambassador arrived on campus via the new cable car and, following a short tour of the Technion’s David and Janet Polak Visitors Center, met with Technion President Professor Uri Sivan and other senior members of the Technion’s management.

“It’s a big honor to be here,” said Ambassador Nides at the meeting with President Sivan. “The Technion’s reputation precedes it. I first heard about the Technion when I was 14 – the fact that it was built before the country was founded, its extensive contribution to Israel’s development, and its role as the cradle of the Start-Up Nation. Moreover, the establishment of the Joan and Irwin Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute in New York together with Cornell University generated a very positive attitude toward Israel and towards the Technion’s contribution to New York City’s economic development.”

The visit focused on research collaborations with partners in the U.S. and the importance of human diversity in academia – a subject close to the ambassador’s heart. President Sivan and Professor Adi Salzberg, VP for Diversity and Inclusion at the Technion, told the ambassador about the ways that the Technion is expanding diversity and promoting an inclusive and safe atmosphere for everyone on campus regardless of their social, national, religious, or gender identities.

President Uri Sivan emphasized the importance of opening the doors of the Technion to every talented young man and woman regardless of their financial situation. “With the help of the Friends of the Technion in Israel and around the world, the Technion offers students an extensive support network through special scholarships and loans, since we are committed to ensuring that no student will stop studying due to financial difficulties. The Technion is the leading university in Israel when it comes to providing student housing and we will continue building additional dormitories for our students.”

President Sivan also said that “in the distant past, our research collaborations mainly involved partners in the United States, but this changed when Israel joined European research programs. To expand the scope of our collaborations with American institutions, it is important to expand the U.S. – Israel Binational Science Foundation.”

Ambassador Nides holds a B.A. in Political Science from the University of Minnesota. He served as the U.S. Deputy Secretary of State for Management and Resources and other senior positions in the public and business sectors. He was appointed to his current position at the end of 2021.

The unique hardware hackathon that recently took place at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology offered participating students a complex technological challenge: to develop an artificial intelligence-based accelerator combined with a RISC-V processor. The Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) hackathon, which took place in the Andrew and Erna Viterbi Faculty of Electrical and Computer Engineering, provided students with the opportunity to work on an important technological challenge in the field of hardware, under the guidance of mentors from both the Technion and from industry.

Professor Shahar Kvatinsky, who is a member of the Faculty of Electrical and computer Engineering, said “we constantly ask ourselves what the role of academia in the 21st century should be, since it no longer has a monopoly on knowledge. Although students have access to information, academia is still very relevant in its ability to teach the students to analyze and solve difficult problems and to introduce them to friends and partners for the journey ahead. This is precisely the goal of the hackathon: to challenge the students with a complicated problem that doesn’t have a single solution, and to encourage them to be creative, to innovate and to work in a team.”

Students Ido Bleiberg and Assaf Klein won first place for coming up with the fastest and most precise solution. Second place went to Chris Shakkour and Laama Huary for the most creative solution. The audience choice award was presented to Zeev Zuckerman and Ari Rozov.

Laama Huary, from the team that won second place, said that “after 30 hours of staring at a screen in order to accelerate the same code, I should have been tired, bored, and indifferent. Yet, somehow, moving back and forth between the processor, the memory and the accelerator, and returning again and again to the same chain of thought gave me energy to continue until the last minute. I would like to thank my partner, Chris, for an amazing experience, the Technion and the Faculty on the motivation we received, and the mentors who generously shared their knowledge with us and didn’t allow our optimism to wane.”

The event was initiated by Professors Freddy Gabbay and Shahar Kvatinsky and was produced by Tami Sasporta and Dolly Gitzis from the Faculty’s Industry Club as well as Maayan Hagar from the Technion’s Entrepreneurship Center. During the hackathon, the students heard short lectures from representatives of the main sponsors: Intel, Elbit, Apple, Mobileye, and Speedata.

 

This year’s Annual Project Presentation Conference at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology’s Faculty of Biomedical Engineering was awarded to students Maya Almagor and Roni Baron. Under the supervision of Professor Yuval Garini, the two developed a technology for spectral imaging of cancer biopsies for precision medicine. According to the students, “Personalized medicine is a developing trend that is driving a revolution in the treatment of cancer. To develop personalized treatment protocols, biomarkers that indicate the presence of specific proteins in the tissue must be detected. In our project, we developed a novel method to efficiently identify multiple biomarkers using a spectral imaging optical system to generate a molecular profile of pathological biopsies labeled with different fluorescent dyes.” As mentioned, the technology will help to analyze cancer cells in support of personalized treatment.

Dean of the Faculty of Biomedical Engineering, Professor Haim Azhari, said “The Project Presentation Conference is the culmination of yearlong research. While working on their projects, the students were required to carry out all stages of the process from concept to realization, starting with a particular medical problem, using their imagination and creative thinking skills to ultimately craft a practical solution. To achieve this, they had to apply the knowledge they acquired here at the Technion during their studies in all aspects of biomedical engineering. We are in no doubt that this hands-on experience exposes them to the biomedical industry as it prepares them for their career.”

Conference participants included 61 fourth-year students. They presented 30 projects to the judges – 40 faculty staff members and alumni now working in the industry. The project course was administered by staff members Dr. Firas Mawase and Associate Professor Nati Korin, and teaching assistants Merav Belenkovich and Rotem Shapira. As is the custom every year, the prizes awarded to the winning projects were donated by Dr. Doron and Liat Adler of Sanolla Medical Devices.

Second prize was presented to Gal Carmely and Noam Shalem, supervised by Dr. Alon Sinai, Assistant Professor Firas Mawase, and Dr. Lior Lev Tov – a faculty alumnus who holds a dual degree in medicine and biomedical engineering and is currently a neurosurgeon and biomedical engineer. One of the state-of-the-art methods for treating tremor in Parkinson’s disease and essential tremor patients is using noninvasive focused ultrasound that induces ablation of a specific target area in the brain. However, identifying the treatment target in the current method lacks a high spatial precision. In this project, the students used advanced methods in imaging, signal processing, and machine learning in MRI data. Then, they developed a novel and more precise method for detecting the target location.

Third prize went to Ofri Vizenblit and Noga Erez, under the supervision of Assistant Professor Assaf Zinger (who is also a faculty alumnus and presently a member of the Technion staff), for the development of nanometric particles for the treatment of triple-negative breast cancer – a disease which has no present effective treatment. Baraah Baryhe and Belal Awaad, supervised by Gili Kamara and Dr. Firas Mawase, took fourth place for their development of an alternative keyboard for patients with myopathic disease (myopathies are neuromuscular disorders). Fifth place was given to Ido Rachbuch and Perla Namour, supervised by Moran Levi and Prof. Nati Korin, for their investigation of microparticles for targeted treatment of abdominal aortic aneurysms. The Audience Favorite prize was won by Mais Hadid and Sabry Assaf, under the supervision of Noam Keidar, Galya Segal, and Associate Professor Yael Yaniv, for their development of a wearable device for epileptic seizure detection and prediction.

For the booklet of abstracts from the Conference, click here.

 

The August edition of our e-newsletter, ‘Technion LIVE,’ is now available: Technion ranks 83rd worldwide; AI-driven personalized medical treatments; autonomous electric cars; and more exciting news.

To read the August edition of ‘Technion LIVE,’ click here.

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The Technion was ranked in 83^rd place on the list of the world’s top 100 universities according to the Shanghai Ranking, the foremost index in the world for ranking institutions of higher education. The new ranking, published today (August 15, 2022), reveals that the Technion improved by 11 places compared to last year, where it was listed in 94^th place.

Since 2012, the Technion has consistently appeared on the Shanghai Ranking Top 100 list (aside from 2020), and this year’s ranking is the highest that the Technion has received in the last four years.

Moreover, the Technion is ranked among the Top 50 institutions in the world in three categories: Aerospace Engineering (Technion is #22), Telecommunication Engineering (#40) and Automation & Control (#49). The index also places the Technion in the #51-75 range for Chemistry and for Transportation Science & Technology.

“The Technion’s presence on the list of the world’s top 100 universities and its improved ranking for two years in a row are a significant and important achievement,” said Technion President Prof. Uri Sivan. “It signifies international recognition of the Technion’s academic and research excellence, and I am very proud of our outstanding faculty. The Technion will continue to invest resources and effort in order to continue to improve in upcoming years. Our strength and success lie in our excellent human capital, which spearheads the numerous achievements and breakthroughs in research and teaching. These successes are the result of hard work and diligence by the academic and administrative faculty, faculty deans and the Technion’s management.

“The Technion’s placement in the Shanghai Ranking and others is not the be-all and end-all, and we will continue to strive for excellence using all the tools at our disposal,” the Technion President emphasized. “The global academic competition is rapidly intensifying, and while many governments around the world are constantly increasing their investments in academia and research, academic development in Israel largely relies on donations, and these are becoming increasingly difficult to obtain.

“In order for Israel to continue to improve its standing at the forefront of global research and to ensure the future of its universities, economy and security, the government must significantly increase its financial investment in research and teaching and adopt a friendlier approach toward admitting foreign students and faculty members. I am delighted that three Israeli academic institutions are listed among the world’s Top 100 universities, but it’s important to remember that without government support and globalization of research institutes, it will be hard for us to remain on the list.”

The Shanghai Ranking, which has been published annually since 2003, evaluates the level of academic institutions around the world according to objective criteria that include the number of Nobel Prize laureates and winners of other prestigious prizes, the number of scientific articles published in leading journals such as Nature and Science, and other indicators relative to the university’s size. The scrupulous Chinese survey examines 1,200 universities, of which 500 are designated leading universities.

This year’s list of the world’s best universities is once again headed by Harvard, Stanford, MIT, Cambridge and Berkeley.

Click here for the complete Shanghai Rankings for 2022.

Researchers in the Henry and Marilyn Taub Faculty of Computer Science at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology will present the decryption of Siemens’ programmable logic controller (PLC) firmware at the prestigious Black Hat Hacker Convention in Las Vegas. The findings of the study were forwarded to the company.

Black Hat is an internationally recognized cybersecurity event series providing the information security community with the latest cutting-edge research, developments and trends in the field.

The research project was led by the Head of the Technion Hiroshi Fujiwara Cyber Security Research Center, Professor Eli Biham, along with Dr. Sara Bitan and M.Sc. students Maxim Barsky, Alon Dankner and Idan Raz.

The group succeeded in hacking the ET200 SP Open Controller, CPU 1515sp, of Siemens’ Simatic S7 series, which represents a new concept in controller planning among numerous vendors. The concept is based on the integration of a standard operating system. In this case, the Windows 10 operating system was integrated into the CPU 1515sp. These controllers are used in various civil and military applications, including transportation systems, factories, power stations, smart buildings, traffic lights, and more. Their purpose is to provide automated process controls that delivers an optimal, fast response to variations in environmental conditions.

Attacks against PLCs have posed a challenge for Siemens, which is considered a vendor that meets the highest security standards in the industry. The S7 PLC series is perceived as innovative and highly secure, largely thanks to the integration of built-in cryptographic mechanisms.

The Technion researchers attacked the CPU 1515sp and, for the first time, decrypted the firmware, which is common to all PLCs in the series. The successful attack enabled the researchers to study the software characteristics. They say that the attack exposed possible vulnerabilities in this PLC and in other controllers in the series, intensifying the need for improved security of these devices. Considering that they are deployed in critical infrastructure and systems such as power plants, water facilities, transportation systems, etc., attacks by hostile elements could pose a danger to everyday life and critical functions.

Dr. Sara Bitan and Alon Dankner will be presenting the research at the Black Hat Convention in Las Vegas.

This year, one of Israel’s most prestigious and poignant educational programs, the Israel Scholarship Education Foundation (ISEF) mark 45 years since its establishment, unfortunately coinciding with the passing of Lily Safra, one of its key founders and the former Honorary Chair of the Edmond J. Safra Philanthropic Foundation.

The ISEF Foundation was founded in 1977 by Edmond J. Safra z”l and his wife Lily Safra, together with Nina Weiner, cofounder and Chairwoman Emerita of the philanthropic organization. Madame Safra, a renowned philanthropist for educational, cultural, and social causes in Israel and aboard, unfortunately passed away recently.

Lily Safra received an honorary doctorate degree from the Technion in 2018 for significant charitable donations to important causes, and specifically for her support of the ISEF program that has helped hundreds of students from the Technion, as well as for her generous donations to support the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering. In 2019, Weiner also received a Technion honorary doctorate degree.

Opening the doors to academic excellence for tomorrow’s scientific leaders

ISEF was established with the goal of narrowing Israel’s socioeconomic gaps by transforming Israel’s disadvantaged communities through access to higher education opportunities for underserved children. ISEF achieves this by awarding university scholarships to promising young students from a wide range of cultural and ethnic groups who share the Foundation’s values and meet the criteria for support – financial need, scholastic excellence, and leadership potential. ISEF supports students throughout their academic journey – from their B.A. through their master’s and Ph.D., and even for their postdoctoral studies.

In addition to access to academic opportunities, ISEF provides students with wraparound support and access to personal development programs that help ensure the program’s impressive graduation rate of over 95%. The program has produced 35 professors and 70 Ph.D. lecturers at Israel’s top universities, including the Technion.

Technion students shine with ISEF’s support

ISEF currently supports several Technion Ph.D. candidates taking part in breakthrough research groups:

Mor Elgarisi from Karmiel, a small town in Northern Israel, earned his B.Sc. in Mechanical Engineering from a local college in his hometown, achieving summa cum laude. Mor took part in the Technion’s graduate program in Mechanical Engineering in Prof. Moran Bercovici’s Microfluidic Technologies Laboratory, entering the direct track to a Ph.D.

Israel Gabay grew up in Qiryat Shemona. He began his studies in the Technion’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering and, thanks to academic excellence, later transferred to the Mechanical Engineering Faculty, where he earned his bachelor’s degree, summa cum laude. During his bachelor’s degree, Israel was recognized on the Technion President’s List for Academic Achievements five times, as well as by the Dean’s List for Academic Excellence and currently he is on a direct path to a Ph.D.

Both Mor and Israel were proud to have a key role in the Fluidic Shaping experiment recently tested by Israeli astronaut Eytan Stibbe in space. Stibbe, who took part in the Rakia mission that was a collaboration between Axiom Space, NASA Ames Research Center, the Israeli Ministry of Innovation, Science, and Technology, and the Ramon Foundation, successfully tested the ability to manufacture optical elements in space for the first time, creating a solid lens from liquid.

Hila Tarazi-Riess is another remarkable Ph.D. candidate in the Faculty of Biotechnology and Food Engineering. Hila is from Giv’at Ze’ev and her research focuses on evaluating the impact of physiologically digested carrageenan (a common food additive) on human gut microbiome. In 2018, Hila won first prize for ‘Innovative Product Development,’ led by the EIT Food Consortium in Europe.

ISEF as a supporting pillar of the Technion’s academic excellence

Several members of Technion faculty are proud ISEF alumni:

Dr. Yaniv Romano is an Assistant Professor at the Departments of Computer Science and of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the Technion. Yaniv earned his B.Sc., M.Sc., and Ph.D. from the Andrew and Erna Viterbi Faculty of Electrical and Computer Engineering Department. He received support from ISEF to conduct postdoctoral research in statistics at Stanford University.

Today, Dr. Romano works to advance theories and practices of modern machine learning systems, focusing on uncertainty quantification, explainability, and robustness.

Dr. Shenhav Cohen is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Biology and head of a lab deciphering the molecular mechanisms that regulate muscle size. Shenhav earned her B.Sc. in Life Science and Ph.D. in Molecular Cell Biology and Cancer at Bar Ilan University before taking part in an ISEF International Fellowship at Harvard Medical School in 2006-2011. In 2013, Dr. Cohen joined the Technion’s Faculty of Biology, enabling her to complete her research on muscular atrophy, which has been published in prestigious medical and scientific journals.

 

Dr. Eitan Yaakobi is an Associate Professor at the Henry and Marilyn Taub Faculty of Computer Science, was an ISEF International Postdoc Fellow in Electrical and

Computer Engineering at the California Institute of Technology, and a Ph.D. fellow at the University of California San Diego. Raised in Qiryat Shemona, Eitan became an ISEF scholar in 2002, earning his B.Sc. and M.Sc. in Mathematics and Computer Science at the Technion. As an ISEF fellow at UC-San Diego, Eitan conducted his Ph.D. research in “error correcting coding for flash drives,” earning him the 2009 Marconi Society’s Young Scholar Award, akin to the Nobel Prize in his field of study. He was awarded the Intel Ph.D. Fellowship Award in 2011 for his research in data storage. Dr. Yaakobi is the current head of the Technion’s Excellence Program.

“This collaboration, fueled by philanthropy, brings together two world-class institutions, Technion and Cincinnati Children’s, and two leading laboratories, each with complementary skills and assets, to improve pediatric medicine on a global scale.”

–Marc Rothenberg, MD, PhD

Cincinnati Children’s Hospital and the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology are working together to improve pediatric medicine on a global scale by establishing a collaborative data-driven research program to utilize big data in novel ways.

Through this collaboration, experts within each institution will train a core group of investigators skilled in biomedical informatics, which uses large data sets to help clinicians, researchers and scientists improve precision medicine, discover treatments, and deliver the best possible healthcare.

These highly trained researchers will support collaborative studies between Cincinnati Children’s and the Technion. The goal: to elevate pediatric medicine on a global scale by leveraging Cincinnati Children’s expertise in patient care, basic research, and translational research with Technion’s excellence in computer science and bioinformatics.

The collaboration, called the “Cincinnati Children’s–Technion Bridge to Next-Gen Medicine,” includes joint workshops, online lectures, faculty/student exchange visits, and research projects. To date, Cincinnati Children’s and Technion have co-sponsored joint academic symposia to exchange expertise between faculty and students, supported postdoctoral training and launched joint research in multiple areas of medicine. This work has already led to early findings published in the scientific literature—but this is just the beginning.

The Cincinnati Children’s–Technion Bridge to Next-Gen Medicine recently announced the first joint bioinformatics research grants, totaling $200,000 and funded through philanthropy. The selected projects for funding will be awarded $50,000 each, and were selected through a joint review process, involving representatives from both institutions. Funded projects include:

• Developing Artificial Intelligence Approaches for Diagnostics and Predicting Treatment Efficacy in Eosinophilic Esophagitis. Marc Rothenberg, MD, PhD and Yoni Savir, PhD

• Deep Learning in Point of Care Ultrasound: Applications in Pediatric Oral and Maxillofacial Emergency Visits for Improving Diagnostic Clinical Workflow. Patrick Ruck, DDS; Sarat Thikkurissy, DDS, MS; Surya Prasath, PhD; Omri Emodi, MD, DMD; and Jiriys Ginini, MSc, DMD

• Resolving Hematopoietic Stem Cell Heterogeneity from Highly Quantitative Long-read Single-cell RNA-Sequencing. Nathan Salomonis, PhD and Yael Mandel-Gutfreund, PhD

• Using Eye-Tracking and Machine Learning Technology to Quantify Joint Attention and Shared Reading Quality in Children with from Disadvantaged Backgrounds and with Medical Complexity. John S. Hutton, MD, MS and Tzipi Horowitz-Kraus, PhD

Michelle Kohn, Cincinnati Children’s Global Director for Israel, noted that Cincinnati Children’s–Technion Bridge to Next-Gen Medicine is one of several flagship collaborations in the medical center’s Israel Exchange Program.

“The goal of the Israel Exchange Program is to leverage the complementary strengths of Cincinnati Children’s and Israel to improve clinical care for children worldwide, expertly train pediatric providers and scientists, achieve breakthrough discoveries, and invent and commercialize products to improve children’s health globally,” Kohn said.

 

She’s already published a scientific article and participated in an international conference, and she’s still completing in her BSc. Technion student Batel Oved presented her research at a major international conference and was nominated for two awards. The research topic: an innovative method for critical cryptographic hash functions.

Batel Oved, a BSc student at the Viterbi Faculty of Electrical and Computer Engineering, recently presented her research at the International Conference on Modern Circuits and Systems Technologies (MOCAST) 2022 in Bremen, Germany. The paper, which she worked on as part of her undergraduate project, was expanded into a scientific article. For the paper she was a candidate for two awards – the Best Student Paper Award and the Best Paper Award in Electronics – following the development of an innovative method for critical cryptographic hash functions.

Batel grew up in Kiryat Ekron and began her undergraduate studies three years ago. During her first year, she decided to apply for a prestigious scholarship, and the requirements included a reference from a Technion professor. Batel says, “At that point, I didn’t personally know any professor, so I decided to reach out to Prof. Shahar Kvatinsky, who taught the course “Digital Systems and Computer Structure” – the first course that exposed me to the world of hardware. I sent him an email, and though I didn’t get a reference for the scholarship (after all, he didn’t know me personally), I did get a better offer: to hear about his research group and maybe even join it.” The two met, and Batel heard “about the crazy stuff they do in the group. Of course, I wanted to be a part of it.” And so, at the start of her second year, Batel joined the ASIC2 research group, where most of the members are students studying for advanced degrees. “I learned a lot there. It started with understanding the technologies we were researching by reading articles about the field, which was incredibly challenging at first. So, I joined the research project of one of the PhD students in the group, in which we studied the practical aspects based on theory. I had the privilege of being involved in designing a printed circuit board for a chip that was also designed by the group, and I took part in testing it in the lab.”

At the end of her second year, like many of her fellow students, Batel looked for a job. “I started working at Microsoft as a chip design intern, but I didn’t want to leave the research group just yet. So, I brought the final undergraduate project forward to the beginning of my third year at the university, supervised by Prof. Kvatinsky.” In the project, Batel demonstrated the huge potential inherent of in-memory computation – a new approach that accelerates calculation speed and reduces the amount of energy consumed in the process.

Batel explains that the approach demonstrated is based on memristive digital processing-in-memory. “Memristors are components that store data, but also can perform logic operations by varying their resistance level. In the article, we chose to present the potential of computations of this kind on a fundamental algorithm in secure communication, specifically, the SHA-3 (Secure Hash Algorithm-3) standard. SHA-3 is a set of cryptographic hash functions, and in the article, we presented a method for their effective implementation, while achieving very high throughput and significantly lower energy consumption compared to other solutions in the field.”

Following the success of the project, Batel worked hard on translating it into a scientific article. She was assisted in the endeavor by Prof. Kvatinsky, Ronny Ronen and Orian Leitersdorf, all of whom “guided me along the way to understand how the world of research works, how to show correctness and extract relevant and reliable information, how to compare the study to other studies using different technologies, and so much more. And we succeeded in authoring an article that presents impressive results.”

The article was submitted and accepted to the IEEE International Conference on Modern Circuits and Systems Technologies (MOCAST) 2022, which took place in Bremen, Germany.