Month: March 2020

NVIDIA

NVIDIA Gives COVID-19 Researchers Free Access to Parabricks

NSF – BSF

proposals to conduct non-medical, non-clinical-care research that can be used immediately to better understand how to model and understand the spread of COVID-19

ISF 

Deadline – March 31

https://www.isf.org.il/Files/Announcement/Guidelines_Kill%20Corona.pdf

The Data Science Institute at Bar-Ilan University

Deadline – March 29

Call for research projects to help with the corona crisis

Ministry of Science and Technology

Deadline –  March 28

https://www.gov.il/he/departments/news/most_news20200322

The Israel Innovation Authority

Deadline – 26/03/2020

https://innovationisrael.org.il/kol-kore/4879

Dangoor Centre For Personalized Medicine, Bar-Ilan University

Deadline – March 25

http://dsi.biu.ac.il/dnagur-corona-cfp

We are looking for a lecturer to teach a course on “Big Data Processing and Analysis”.
The course is intended for STEM students (Chemistry, Physics, Life Sciences, Geography and Environment, Math, Engineering) providing them with theory, techniques and tools to deal with very large amounts of data.

Course will be taught at Bar-Ilan University during fall 2020 (semester I of 2020-2021 academic year).

Following is a draft syllabus – סילבוס קורס ניתוח ועיבוד נתוני עתק – טיוטא (to be updated and finalized by lecturer).

If interested, please send email to dsi@biu.ac.il

AI2 released a large dataset of ~29k coronavirus related research papers, in a somewhat-convenient-to-process json format. The data is hosted on Kaggle, with an accompanying list of research questions (provided by the white house and NIH) including information they want to get extracted out of the data.
These are the questions:https://www.kaggle.com/allen-institute-for-ai/CORD-19-research-challenge/tasks

This can be an interesting opportunity for some relevant and hands-on NLP work, especially those of you who already are into relation extraction / health / biomed. Any approach goes, clustering, ML, sci-BERT, hand-built heuristics… happy to brainstorm about this.
Moreover, some of you may remember that i briefly presented a tool that allows querying of syntax-based patterns over wikipedia data. We (at AI2 Israel) indexed this coronavirus corpus with the tool, to allow syntactic queries over it. This can also be an interesting avenue for exploring the data. While the tool is not yet ready for public release, and is a bit rough around the edges, I will be happy to share it with the lab if there is interest. If anyone wants, I will present the tool to you again in a zoom meeting tomorrow (if there is interest, probably around 15:00, email me if interested).
Following are two papers that we submitted to the ACL demo track: one of them describing the search tool (reading sections 6 and 7), and another about Aryeh’s work (joint with Reut) on BART: an extended syntactic representation that exposes many relation-extraction related relations in a more unified way (it is relevant, as the tool is indexing syntactic graphs after Aryeh’s enhancements. + it is also a really cool paper, imo).

Yet_another_Enhanced_UD_Representation (2)

SyntacticSearchACL2020Demo-5

The Bar-Ilan Data Science Institute has initiated a call for research grants that aim to help with the challenges the world is facing due to the corona virus (COVID-19) outbreak.

This is a short cycle call for grants proposals of up to 50K NIS. Deadline: March 29, 2020.

Please see call for full details:

2020 DSI Corona grants CFP

Full Grants

Prof. Yanay Ofran, Life Sciences
Prof. Ron Unger, Life Sciences
Prof. Yoav Goldberg, Computer Science
What makes a sequence of amino acids a protein? Data Driven Approach
75,000 ₪

Dr. Anat Tchetchik, Geography and Environment
Dr. Nir Cohen, Geography and Environment
Prof. Orly Benjamin, Sociology
Constructing a comparative database: cash and in-kind urban welfare payments
72,000 ₪

Prof. Yoram Louzoun, Math
Dr. Omry Koren, Medicine
Predicting the effect of the perturbation on the human microbiome for therapeutic intervention
86,000 ₪

Dr. Vadim Axelrod, Brain
Dr. Baruch Barzel, Math
Network analysis of vegetative state functional MRI data to understand mechanisms of consciousness
86,000 ₪

Prof. Gal Chechik, Brain
Prof. Sharon Gannot, Engineering
Audio-visual referring expressions
86,000 ₪

Dr. Baruch Barzel, Math
Dr. Simi Haber, Math
Dr. Amir Bashan, Physics
Nonlinear to linear Spectral theory for nonlinear network dynamics
86,000 ₪

Dr. Yogev Kivity, Psychology
Prof. Reut Tsarfaty, Computer Science
Learning to Automatically Assess the Capacity for Mentalizing in Clinical Interviews via Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning Techniques
86,000 ₪

Prof. Oren Perez, Law
Prof. Reuven Cohen, Math
Networked Compliance: Exploration of Regulatory Inter-linkages in a Multifaceted Regulatory Setting Using Network Analysis
60,000 ₪

Dr. Jonathan Rubin, Land of Israel Studies and Archaeology
Burchard of Mount Sion’s Descriptio Terre Sancte: Application of Machine Learning Technologies to the Study of Its Transmission and Reception
77,000 ₪

Small Grants

Prof. Roy Gelbard, Business Administration
Dr. Alon Raviv, Business Administration
Prof. Daniel Levy, Economics
Trends and Events in Business and Economics: A Text-Mining Approach
40,000 ₪

Prof. Oren Perez, Law
Dr. Milana Frenkel-Morgenstern, Medicine
Optimizing the Realization of Legal Rights by Alzheimer’s and Dementia Patients Using AI
25,000 ₪

Dr. Rose Stamp, English Literature and Linguistics
Israeli Sign Language (ISL) Corpus
40,000 ₪

Dr. Amiyaal Ilany, Life Sciences
Building an integrative relational database for a long-term animal study
36,000 ₪

Dr. Itamar Lensky, Geography and Environment
Dr. Anat Tchetchik, Geography and Environment
Dr. Keren Agay-Shay, Medicine
Prof. Eyal Yaniv, Business Administration
GREEN SMART CITY: USING PRECISION AGRICULTURE TECHNOLOGIES ON GREEN HIGH-RISE BUILDING WALLS
25,000 ₪

Dr. Ittai Bar-Siman-Tov, Law
Dr. Ayelet Sela, Law
A Thematic Analysis and Typology of Ethical Risks in Terms of Service and Privacy Policy Agreements of Mobile Applications
40,000 ₪

Prof. Reuven Cohen, Math
Dr. Simi Haber, Math
Prof. Yoav Goldberg, Computer Science
The Network Properties of Word Embeddings
30,000 ₪

An new online course on networks – Starting March 25!

https://lnkd.in/eb-S_Ns

The Online school is a theoretical and practical introduction to Network science. Students will learn the basic concepts and methods to analyze and understand complex networks, starting with the fundamentals of network science, and culminating with the latest applications in infrastructure resilience, physiological networks and the microbiome. The school brings together some of the current leaders in the field, all part of the Bar-Ilan Network Science Center team. Students will learn about the universal language describing social, biological and technological systems: Basic applications of graph theory to modern scientific challenges. What makes networks robust and resilient. How to model interdependencies between networks. How do information (and epidemics) spread in complex networks. State-of-the-art applications from brain to power systems.

Recent report written by Dr. Ittai Bar-Siman-Tov on “Parliamentary Activity and Legislative Oversight during the Coronavirus Pandemic -A Comparative Overview” See – https://lnkd.in/eQuEmvH

Abstract:

The novel Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is extremely contagious and currently incurable. Hence, much of the efforts to contain the pandemic have focused on social distancing, prohibiting gatherings and even curfews. The Coronavirus poses a new dual challenge for legislatures. First, the Coronavirus, and the measures taken to contain its spread, make it difficult and even dangerous for parliaments to operate, given that legislatures are by their very nature large multi-member bodies whose operation requires assembling a large group of people together to deliberate and vote. Second, the Coronavirus pandemic creates a sense of emergency that empowers the executive branch and emboldens it to assert greater authority at the expenses of the legislature.

Despite these challenges, the continued operation of legislatures throughout the Coronavirus crisis, and particularly the maintenance of legislative oversight of the executive, has never been more vital. Legislatures have a crucial role in checking the executive and ensuring that countries will not lose their constitutional and democratic values in the process of managing the Coronavirus crisis.

This report begins by explicating the novel dual challenge the Coronavirus pandemic poses for legislatures. It than focuses on elaborating on the unique challenge currently faced by the Israeli Parliament. It explains how the unique combination between the Coronavirus pandemic and the complex political situation in Israel, has made the issue of parliamentary operation during the Coronavirus pandemic particularly acute and urgent.  

Against this background, this report examines whether and how parliaments in other democracies are operating during this crucial period of the evolving Coronavirus pandemic. Drawing on a combination of two main types of sources – a network of expert academics and a network of parliamentary research centers – it presents a novel and timely comparative overview about current parliamentary activity during the Coronavirus pandemic. The report covers 26 democratic parliaments from Europe, North America, Asia, Israel and Australia. It finds that most parliaments continue to operate during the Coronavirus crisis (including in countries in which the pandemic is quite substantial and in countries where legislators themselves were among those diagnosed with the coronavirus). It also finds that even though some parliaments continue with business as usual, many parliaments are beginning to modify their operation, and generally show an ability to adapt to meet the Coronavirus challenge.

Vatat Call for Phd and post-doc scholarships:

• מלגות ות”ת לדוקטורנטים מצטיינים במדעי הנתונים – due March 19
• קול קורא למלגות הות”ת לבתר-דוקטורטים ישראלים היוצאים לחו”ל  – due March 19

Upcoming Talks and Events:

• March 3, 14:00-15:00. “Explaining visual understanding: Learn to reason about the perceived world” – Talk by Prof. Gal Chechik at The Israel Statistical Association workshop: Explainable AI (XAI). Facebook Tel-Aviv.
• March 3 – 4: Common Mechanism in Alzheimer’s diseases and T2D uncovered by Big Data and Deep Learning. Workshop. The Azrieli Faculty of Medicine, Safed. 
• March 5, 11:00-12:00: “What’s wrong with Hebrew NLP? And How to Make it Right”. Talk by Prof. Reut Tsarfaty at AI FOR HUMAN LANGUAGE 2020. Rokach blvd. 101, TEL AVIV.
• March 19, 10:30 – 11:30: Impactful AI: Creating the World We Want to See. Special Talk by Dr. Richard Socher, Salesforce’s Chief Scientist. At Bar-Ilan Campus.

Other Calls:

• The Israeli Center for Promoting Research in Smart Transportation – call for MS/PHD scholarships and call for travel grants – due March 8
• Facebook – call for research proposals: Statistics for Improving Insights, Models, and Decisions  (topics include Anomaly Detection and Interpretability techniques for AI models) – due March 25.

DSI Call for Research Grants:

• We had 57 proposals submitted (41 regular, 16 small) by 74 PIs from 23 departments.  
• List of accepted grants expected to be published March 4, 2020.