DSI Call for Travel Grants 2023 (תשפ”ג)

The Data Science Institute at Bar-Ilan University

Call publication: January, 2023 

Objectives

BIU DSI would like to enhance the visibility of data science research at BIU and to promote the education and career of young students. Therefore, we are opening this call to provide travel grants to encourage the active participation of students in top-tier scientific international events. Grants will be provided for authors of a novel scientific paper in major conferences primarily in the core DS areas. 

Call Details

Funding scope and duration

  • Limitations:
    • Up to 7K for a trip to the Americas/Far East/Australia
    • Up to 4K for EMEA 
  • The funds will be available for travel that will take place until the end of Aug 2023. 
  • The call will be continuously open until the budget is exhausted. Generally, the proposals will be evaluated on a “first come first served” basis. 
  • The DSI may decide at any point to end or freeze the call based on availability of funds.
  • Proposals will be evaluated by a committee assigned by the DSI.

Eligibility criteria

  • Venue must be a top-tier core data-science venue. Accepted venues include:
    • ML: NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, MLSP 
    • Vision: CVPR, ICCV, ECCV
    • NLP: ACL, EMNLP, NAACL
    • Data Mining: KDD, CIKM, PKDD, ICDM 
    • Audio & Speech:  ICASSP, EUSIPCO, Interspeech, WASPAA, ASRU
    • AI: AAAI, IJCAI
    • Web: WWW, SIGIR, WSDM
    • Others: based on committee’s approval of similar prominence to those in the list
  • The call is open to all BIU research students of DSI Members:
    • An applying student needs to be an active registered BIU student or PostDoc.
    • A DSI Faculty Member must be an advisor of the applicant, and should support the application.
  • Up to 3 granted awards for applications supported by the same advisor
  • No more than one award per student. 
  • Grants are eligible only to authors of a main venue paper.
  • Budget limitations apply per paper/publication – in the case that there are multiple authors of the same paper. 

Submission Guidelines

  • The proposal should be submitted by a student, signed and supported by the advisor.
  • Response will be given within 3 weeks of submitting the request. If the travel grant is approved, a budget number will be provided for the Bar-Ilan travel application form, with the allocated amount.
  • Submit request as soon as possible after receiving the conference acceptance notice (and in any case up to 3 weeks before submitting the travel approval form to the Gizbarut, to allow inclusion of the respective budget item for the travel grant).

Each proposal should include the following information, using the attached template file:

  1. The publication details: Name of Venue, title of talk, abstract and names of co-authors 
  2. Abstract 
  3. Acceptance approval 
  4. Travel dates (travel must take place during 2023)
  5. Rough budget plan:
    1. Total Budget – itemized
    2. Indicate amount requested from DSI.
    3. List of other funding sources (if applicable).  
  6. Names and Signatures of applicant and advisor

The proposal should be submitted to the Bar-Ilan Data Science Institute dsi@biu.ac.il.    

Process

  • Call open for continuous submission till the end of Aug 2023, for trips incurred in 2023. 
  • Process will follow the standard travel report process at BIU (including submitting the post-travel report for reimbursement).   

For any questions contact: dsi@biu.ac.il

Oracle for Research

Oracle Israel is working with Bar-Ilan University in order to create a research community that brings about positive change in the world by advancing research through cloud computing.

Oracle approaches this through a program of direct support and community engagement. Direct Support is achieved through the provision of Oracle for Research grants. 

The program provides the following benefits:

  • A simple and fast grant request process 
  • Provision of sufficient Credits in Oracle Cloud to run the research program. (The Credits can be used freely across all platform and infrastructure services e.g.  GPUs, HPC clusters including RDMA Networking,  Research friendly technology such as Oracle Autonomous Database)
  • End to end support by both local and global Oracle resources assisting with Cloud and Research related topics:
  • Collaborative marketing and signal boosting around published papers, media releases and services. 
  • Research institute / academic retains all IP rights. 
  • Open Data: Hosting and optimisation of large public and reference data sets. 
  • Open source tooling: Investments in tooling and automation to make these data sets more useful.
  • Connections: Building and supporting communities of practice to take these tools and data forwards to solve some real world issues.

Happy to start with you- please contact Noam Nudelman – IT BIU. <noam@biu.ac.il>

List of DSI grant winners – TASHPAB

The competitive call received 20 submissions by 26 PIs from 13 Departments – demonstrating the broad and diverse reach of the DSI. 11 projects by 19 PIs were accepted and granted a total of 1,100,000₪ while generating many new collaborations.

The list of accepted grants:

PIsTitle
Prof. Yoram Louzoun (Math)Prediction with very high fraction of missing data
Prof. Onn Shehory (Business Administration)Prediction and optimization of patient appointment lengths
Prof. Dan T. Major (Chemistry)Modeling Molecules in 3D using SE(3) Equivariant Self-Supervision Interaction Potentials
Dr. Alon Bartal (Business Administration)Identifying Novel Risk Factors for Childbirth-Related Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder by Analyzing Medical Records of Peripartum Women
Prof. Hillel Kugler (Engineering)Prof. Tomer Kalisky (Engineering)A toolset for predictive modeling of Gene Regulatory Networks in development and disease
Prof. Gur Yaari (Engineering)Dr. Ofir Lindenbaum (Engineering)Immune receptor sequence alignment using deep neural networks
Prof. Gil Ariel (Math)Dr. Emanuel A. Lazar (Math)Topological Data Analysis of Biological and Chemical Patterns
Prof. Michal Ben-Shachar (Linguistics)Dr. Yael Greenberg (Linguistics)Prof. Yoav Goldberg (Computer Science)Prediction, Expectation and Mirativity in Natural Language
Dr. Binyamin Knisbacher (Life Sciences)Prof. Shlomo Havlin (Physics)Studying heterogeneity in aging and cancer through single-cell gene expression networks
Dr. Amit Somech (Computer Science)Dr. Oren Glickman (Computer Science)Generating On-Demand Data Tables From Text
Prof. Simi Haber (Math)Prof. Reuven Cohen (Math)Reliability and flexibility of the power grid and other infrastructure networks
List of DSI grant winners – TASHPAB

Congrats to the winners and we are looking forward to learning about their progress in upcoming DSI dinner events.