The BIU AI machine learning (ML) and data science learning club aim at connecting researchers engaging in any type of ML (vision, NLP, speech, etc.) from BIU. Every week we will host researchers (mainly) from the Israeli academia and industry to further extend the knowledge of the members and to increase collaboration and innovation within BIU.
How to get information? There are several ways to get notified on learning club events:
First, you are highly encouraged to join the learning club google group (link): learning-club-biu. Note that all announcements (either event-related or not) will be made there.
Second, you may subscribe to the learning club google calendar: biu.learning.club. This will allow you to get exposed to all events and import them to your calendar.
Third, all evets will appear on the DSI website under the learning club events page (link).
Location and Time. The meetings are held on Sundays at 12 PM IDT. Exact details will be provided before each event.
The call for the VATAT scholarships for outstanding Postdoc students and VATAT scholarship for outstanding Data Science doctoral students in their first or second year was circulated. Details will be provided from the departments and in a separate email to the DSI members.
DSI additional call for PhD scholarships
We are happy to share that this year the DSI will also grant scholarships for outstanding Data Science doctoral students in their first or second year, intended exclusively for the DSI members’ students. Details will come later in a separate email to the DSI members.
HIDA
As part of the partnership between the Israel Data Science Initiative (IDSI) and the Helmholtz Information and Data Science Academy (HIDA) we recently circulated a call for the student exchange program. We are happy to share that we had two applications from BIU DSI members. We’ll keep updated with additional relevant HIDA programs and calls.
CFPs
EUMAS 2021 Call for Papers: The 18th European Conference on Multi-Agent Systems (EUMAS ’21) is organized by Ariel Rosenfeld (Bar-Ilan) and Nimrod Talmon (BGU) and will be held (virtually) at June 28-29, 2021; the deadline for submissions is March 14, 2021. See details here: https://biu-ai.com/EUMAS21/
Computing
R: There is an active community of R users with over 80 members. If you use R in your research and interested in being part of the community, please send an email to Dr. Yogev Kivity – yogev.kivity@biu.ac.il.
Oracle POC: As part of a POC with Oracle Cloud Platform they have offered us free credits to use their platform till the end of March. Platform includes a wide range of possible server configurations including strong GPUs. If interested please send an email to oren.glickman@biu.ac.il.
Google’s TensorFlow Research Cloud (TFRC) program enables researchers to apply for access to a cluster of more than 1,000 Cloud TPUs. For more information and application see – https://www.tensorflow.org/tfrc
Events
All relevant events are posted on the DSI website.
Workshop: State-of-the-Art Natural Language Processing (NLP) for Research in the Social Sciences and Humanities
Workshop on State-of-the-Art NLP will be held on Thursday May 27th, 2021 at Bar-Ilan University for research faculty and research students in the social sciences and humanities who wish to use up-to-date Natural Language Processing methods in their research domains.
We would like to remind you that we (the DSI) maintain a list of data science courses that are given at BIU, which can be easily explored by different category types. The interactive list is available on our website:
How can we analyze and share data without jeopardizing privacy?
Dr. Or Sheffet from the Faculty of Engineering will be teaching a course on Differential Privacy.
The course studies the theory underlying differential privacy its connections to a vast array of research areas: statistics, learning theory, cryptography, computational complexity, convex geometry, mechanism design, and more.
Eng. 83908: Mon, 17:00-19:00, Online (Zoom).
Faculty Credit Program (Google)
Google offers a faculty credit program providing cloud credit to students. Faculty members can apply specifying the course details and will issue individual coupons (typically of $50) that students can redeem and apply to their accounts.. These coupons are instrumentless so there is no credit card needed when using these credits. If during the course a student runs out of credits, one can always issue them more. For more information please see receiving and redeeming coupons.
Open Positions
M.A., Ph.D. and Postdoc positions
Prof. Sharon Gannot is looking for PhD students and/or Postdoctoral trainees with a strong background in statistical signal processing and machine learning. Experience in audio signal processing and high programming skills will be considered as an advantage. Suitable for advanced Computer Science or Engineering students. Details:: gannotsh@gmail.com
Tomer Kalisky’s single cell genomics lab is seeking M.Sc. and Ph.D. students. The group studies single-cell genomics in development, regeneration, and cancer using computational data analysis and machine learning algorithms. Qualifications: a strong background in engineering, physics, mathematics, computer science, or computational biology. Excellent undergraduate students are also encouraged to apply. Details: Tomer.kalisky@biu.ac.il.
Open PhD and MSc positions at the Neural Interfaces lab lead by Prof. Izhar Bar-Gad (Brain Research Center):
Identification of involuntary movements from video: In a joint project with Schneider children’s hospital they collected videos from Tourette syndrome patients displaying involuntary facial movements (motor tics).
Research definition: Unsupervised learning algorithms for identifying repeating behavioral motifs from the video.
Identification of animal behavior from a kinematic time series: They record kinematic signals (accelerometer, gyroscope, magnetometer) from animals during natural behavior. This information is consequently used to decode the behavior and link it to brain activity.
Research definition: Unsupervised learning algorithms for identifying repeating behavioral motifs from the kinematic signals.
Required background: Machine learning, Time series analysis.
The Smart Transportation Center (BIU + Technoin) is running a project that requires implementing a text classification system for academic articles. They are looking for a student to work on the project on an hourly basis. Estimated 100 hours over the next 3-4 months (budget of 7,000 NIS). For context see Initial Report on Knowledge Gap Identification – Big Data and Data Analytics Committee. Anyone interested can send an email to: oren.glickman@biu.ac.il
Industry
Google
Google offers courses/training in our cloud programs for Students and Faculty for Career readiness. This will allow the students to build skills for Cloud in two areas: Cloud Engineer and Data Analyst
Career readiness – information on the program and link for application – Link
For questions regarding Google programs and offers feel free to contact Ofra Shaltiel, Public Sector Business Manager, Google Cloud, Israel, EMEA. ofras@google.com
Nvidia Deep Learning Institute (DLI) Ambassadors
Nvidia Deep Learning Institute (DLI) is looking for PhD students/academic faculty members who wish to be Ambassadors – certified on Nvidia courses, and who may run Nvidia courses free of charge at the universities (note – these courses are usually paid courses). Up until now there were 6 ambassadors from 3 universities in Israel, and the desire is to expand the local ambassador numbers. Running these courses at the university can be a great benefit for students and faculty – where courses vary from Fundamentals of DL to areas like NLP, Video Analytics, and more. Courses usually run as 1 day seminars.
For more information on Nvidia DLI and the Ambassador program see these two links below:
2021 Internships with the Facebook Core Data Science team
Core Data Science (https://research.fb.com/teams/core-data-science/) at Facebook Research is accepting applications for an intern position with the team in Tel Aviv for the summer of 2021. For the Tel Aviv based internship they are looking for PhD students and postdocs with experience in ML, Statistics, or CS, including PhD students from other fields that have hands-on experience with those research areas. The internship program consists of 12-16 weeks of full-time paid work. The internships are planned for summer 2021, though there’s some flexibility.
We are happy to share that this year we had 3 winners:
VATAT scholarships for outstanding Postdoc students (1 out of 3 total nationwide!):
Bracha Laufer Goldstein, the Faculty of Engineering
VATAT scholarship for outstanding Data Science doctoral students (2 out of 10 total nationwide!):
Omer Kaspi, Department of Chemistry
Lior Bracha, the Brain Research Center
Vatat Competitive Call
Recently, Bar-Ilan’s response to the Vatat Competitive Call for additional funding to the data science centers in all universities was completed and submitted by the DSI. The response to the Call, with a 4-year NIS 58 million national budget for all universities (up to NIS 16 million per institution), consisted of six strong projects proposed by 15 faculty members (PIs and Co-PIs of the submitted proposal), spread across various departments and units (CS Department, Faculty of Engineering, Math. Department, Brain Research Center, Faculty of Life Science, Faculty of Medicine, Faculty of Law and Psychology Department). We are hoping to be informed soon that Bar-Ilan won significant support, which will allow additional collaborations, enlarging the BIU DS community and enhancing computing infrastructure.
ISF DS and Social Sciences
ISF opened this year, as part of its Personal Research Grants Program, a special track of Data Science in Social Sciences. BIU had 3 submissions from PIs in Engineering, Information Science, Criminology, Education and Law.
Upcoming Calls
Future DSI 2021 Calls
The DSI will soon come out with calls for research grants and event grants in the field of data science as well as scholarships for data science research students. We are inviting all the community members to take part and submit their proposals as the DSI Calls come out.
ELLIS (European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Systems) is a European grassroots initiative in AI with a focus on scientific excellence, innovation and societal impact. It aims to create a European AI Laboratory inspired by models such as EMBL (European Molecular Biology Laboratory) and the Vector Institute (Toronto).
We plan to apply to have BIU a member university of ELLIS. In meantime, we encourage all DSI faculty members to become an ELLIS member (does not require BIU to be a member). Note that there are other benefits including an ELLIS PhD Program. Existing Bar-Ilan members: Prof. Ido Dagan, Prof. Yoav Goldberg and Prof. Gal Chechik.
Vatat’s Data Science Steering Committee Report
Vatat recently shared a report summarizing its Data Science Steering committee’s findings. We would like to thank Prof. Gal Chechik for representing Bar-Ilan in the committee and for a work well done!
Part of the report was based on a survey of 685 faculty members in Israel. Bar-Ilan stands out with over 100 faculty members from Bar-Ilan who participated in the survey. Bar-Ilan is also clearly the most diverse set of faculty members spanning over a very wide range of faculties and departments.
Computing
IBM Cloud computing workshop series: IBM offered to host a series of workshops on various cloud computing topics exclusively to BIU researchers and students.
Nvidia GPU programming workshop: NVIDIA offered to host a technical workshop on GPU programming exclusively to BIU researchers and students. Workshop will take place on 9 March 2021 10-12am. Workshop will cover working with containers in a GPU environment, multi gpu programming, useful tools and more. For more details and registration please see: http://dsi.biu.ac.il/event/nvidia-gpu-programming-workshop/
R: We are planning on opening a BIU community of R users aimed for faculty members and grad students who use R in their research. If interested, please send an email to Dr. Yogev Kivity – yogev.kivity@biu.ac.il.
Oracle POC: As part of a POC with Oracle Cloud Platform they have offered us free credits to use their platform to be used in the next couple of months. Platform includes a wide range of possible server configurations including strong GPUs. If interested please send an email to oren.glickman@biu.ac.il.
Events
All relevant events are posted on the DSI website.
Learning Club – Machine Learning Talk Series
The BIU Learning club is an ongoing seminar on machine learning that takes place on Sundays featuring select speakers from Israel and abroad.
Upcoming talk: On Size Generalization in Graph Neural Networks and Lottery Tickets
The LawData Lab has a series of events during the year, including conferences and a lab seminar, in which a number of guest speakers will be hosted. Meetings are held at Zoom. The next two events are a conference, with the Israel Tech Policy Institute, about the use of AI and algorithmic decision-making in governmental services on 26.1.21; and an international conference, with the the Jean Monnet Centre of Excellence on Digital Governance, about digital governance during Covid-19 on 17-18.2.21.
DSI Dinner
Unfortunately, during Covid we were not able to hold an on-campus community event. In the meantime, we would like to share the following story shared by Prof. Roy Gelbard (DS member, The School of Business Administration):
Dr. Anna Khalemsky, a PhD student of Roy has recently graduated (congrats Anna!). Her recent Molecular Informatics publication – “Dynamic Classification for Materials-Informatics: Mining the Solar Cell Space” by Abraham Yosipof, Anna Khalemsky, Roy Gelbard and Hanoch Senderowitz was a direct result of the institute’s second dinner. Anna presented her work as a poster as well as Avi (Dr. Abraham Yosipof, at the time a Phd Student at Chemistry Dept. under supervision by Prof. Hanouch Senderowitz) in the dinner event. The joint exposure resulted in exchanging ideas and collaboration resulting in development of a new methodology and the joint publication.
Hopefully, we will be able to all meet face to face this spring and foster more collaborations!
Introduction to Data Science Workshop
The University of Haifa’s Data Science Research Center offers a series of workshops for faculty members and research students who have no background in the field of data science. As part of our collaboration with the center, they have opened the workshops to DSI faculty members and their grand students. The workshop consists of 7-8 sessions (zoom), each session lasts 3 hours. To register for the workshop Introduction to Data Science without programming, fill in the following details: https://forms.gle/qES5ayNur95TmgSK6.
Please mark the date of the lecture that best suits you.
Community
DSI Members: Congratulations, Appointments, Awards and Grants
Appointments
Congratulations to Prof. Liat Ayalon from the School of Social Work on her election to the Advisory Committee on Senior Citizens to the Minister Meirav Cohen from the Ministry of Social Equality and to the Advisory Committee to the World Health Organization on the long-term care of the elderly.
Dr. Ariel Rosenfeld from the Department of Information Science was elected as Conference Chair of the 18th European Conference on Multi-Agent Systems.
Congratulations to Prof. Sharon Gannot from the Faculty of Engineering on his elevation to IEEE Fellow.
Congratulations to Dr. Ayelet Sela from the Faculty of Law on choosing her to be one of the 40 promising young people under the age of 40 in TheMarker.
Noteworthy Publication and Best Paper Awards
Congratulations to Prof. Sharon Gannot from the Faculty of Engineering on the occasion of selecting his article as an “outstanding article” in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.
Congratulations to Dr. Amir Bashan from the Department of Physics for publishing his article in Nature Metabolism.
Congratulations to Dr. Milana Frenkel-Morgenstern on her recent Nucleic Acids Research paper: “COVID19 Drug Repository: text-mining the literature in search of putative COVID19 therapeutics”.
Awards and Grants
Congratulations to Prof. Hadar Dancing-Rosenberg and Prof. Ruth Halperin-Kaddari from the Faculty of Law on winning the EU scholarships.
Congratulations to Prof. Hadar Dancing-Rosenberg for winning a research scholarship from the JDC.
Congratulations to Dr. Adam Zaidel from the Brain Research Center for winning a grant from the National Science Foundation.
Dr. Maayan Zhitomirsky-Geffet is a member of the European consortium that received funding of 2,000,000 Euro from Horizon 2020 for SwafS15-2019 for Citizen Scientists Investigating Cookies and App GDPR compliance, CSI-COP.
Congratulations to Dr. Ittai Bar-Siman-Tov from the Faculty of Law and LawData Lab for winning a research grant from the Volkswagen Foundation for a study that will use data science tools to investigate the Effects of Covid-19 on the Functioning of Parliaments (together with Thomas Saalfeld & Olivier Rozenberg).
Congratulations to Prof. Omry Koren for winning the prestigious ERC Consolidated research fund.
DSI Students: Congratulations, Scholarships and Awards
Scholarships
Congratulations to Ofir Stegmann, a PhD student from the Faculty of Law and the Department of Mathematics on winning the President Scholarship for Excellence and Scientific Innovation for his proposal “The Knesset Network – Connectivity and Success”.
Congratulations to Ayelet Peres, a PhD student from the Faculty of Engineering, for winning a doctoral scholarship for outstanding women in the high-tech fields.
Congratulations to Yanai Elazar, a PhD student from the Department of Computer Science, on winning the prestigious Google PhD Fellowship for 2020.
Congratulations to Bar Fargon Mizrahi, a PhD student from the Faculty of Law and LawData Lab, for winning the best paper award in the international conference on Human Sovereignty and Machine Efficiency in the Law in Hong Kong.
Research Spotlights
LawData Lab
The BIU Innovation Lab for Law, Data-Science and Digital Ethics at Bar Ilan-University Faculty of Law focuses on two primary tracks: (1) data-driven legal research using various data-science methods (e.g., ML, NLP, social network analysis); (2) normative and ethical analysis, focusing on legal and regulatory aspects of big data, data analytics and AI, and on ensuring proper data governance. The lab is based on an interdisciplinary collaboration between legal researchers from the BIU Faculty of Law and data scientists from the BIU Data Science Institute and other affiliated BIU departments. It is also based on an international collaboration as part of the Jean Monnet Centre of Excellence on Digital Governance (DIGOV). It additionally works with partners from technology companies and other industry and government actors. This year, Dr. Keren Yalin-Mor, who has a background in both law and computer science, joined the lab as lab manager.
Retorno
The first academic center of its kind for the study of the treatment, rehabilitation and prevention of addiction has been inaugurated at Bar-Ilan University. The center, headed by Prof. Natti Ronel from the Department of Criminology, is a joint venture of Bar-Ilan and the Retorno organization, which was founded 30 years ago by Rabbi Eitan Eckstein and operates in Beit Shemesh.
The new Bar-Ilan Retorno Center envisions two main directions: The first is the application of data science by the therapeutic community: as data from a variety of sources accumulates (e.g., weather, meal menu, community events), the community will be able to adapt treatment to the needs of the particular patient, as is done in personalized medicine, and to adapt itself to the needs of all patients. Data science will also allow for the creation of a growing body of research knowledge. The second research direction is to encourage Retorno employees to initiate and conduct research, as research physicians do at a university hospital. The Bar-Ilan Retorno Center will operate as an “impact center” in accordance with Bar-Ilan University’s preeminent research approach, which addresses the challenges of the future, integrating various fields of knowledge in multidisciplinary research.
Among the goals of the DSI is to strengthen and extend the data science course and program offerings at Bar-Ilan. As part of this goal, we have initiated a committee headed by the Bar-Ilan Rector, with representatives from the core data science departments. The first goal of the committee is to increase, improve and consolidate the applied data science course and program offerings in STEM departments. In parallel to this initiative, the DSI is continuing its support in this academic year for including python as the programming course of choice in multiple STEM departments, including Chemistry, Brain Science, Math and Engineering.
DS Course List
We would like to remind you that we (the DSI) maintain a list of data science courses that are given at BIU, which can be easily explored by different category types. The interactive list is available on our website:
Open M.S. position to work on a funded project on ”The Network Properties of Word Embeddings” under the supervision of Prof. Reuven Cohen and Dr. Simi Haber (Math) and Prof. Yoav Goldberg (CS).
Open PhD and MSc positions at the Neural Interfaces lab lead by Prof. Izhar Bar-Gad:
Identification of involuntary movements from video: In a joint project with Schneider children’s hospital they collected videos from Tourette syndrome patients displaying involuntary facial movements (motor tics).
Research definition: Unsupervised learning algorithms for identifying repeating behavioral motifs from the video.
Identification of animal behavior from a kinematic time series: They record kinematic signals (accelerometer, gyroscope, magnetometer) from animals during natural behavior. This information is consequently used to decode the behavior and link it to brain activity.
Research definition: Unsupervised learning algorithms for identifying repeating behavioral motifs from the kinematic signals.
Required background: Machine learning, Time series analysis.
For more details, please reach out to: Prof. Izhar Bar-Gad (Brain Research Center).
Tomer Kalisky’s research group is studying single-cell genomics in development, regeneration, and cancer using computational data analysis and machine learning algorithms. They are hiring graduate students for M.Sc. and Ph.D. positions. Qualifications: a strong background in engineering, physics, mathematics, computer science, or computational biology. Excellent undergraduate students are also encouraged to apply. For more details see: single cell genomics lab or contact Tomer.kalisky@biu.ac.il.
RA and Student positions
An MA student with python/data-science skills for work on a funded project led by Dr. Rose Stamp in the English Literature & Linguistics department. The project will include analysis of sign language and motion capture data using machine learning and python scripts. 50% position. Work expected to result in academic publications.
Prof. Sharon Gannot is looking for talented and committed PhD students and/or Postdoctoral trainees with strong background in statistical signal processing and machine learning. Experience in audio signal processing and high programming skills will be considered as an advantage. Suitable for advanced Computer Science or Engineering students. Students will be paid on an hourly basis, for application development as part of a study in the department of Psychology.
Academic Positions
The Azrieli Faculty of Medicine in the Galilee, Bar-Ilan University seeks outstanding candidates for several tenure track faculty positions at the Lecturer/Senior Lecturer/Associate and Full Professor level in Population Health, including but not limited to: Data Science, Biostatistics, Health Economics and Behavioral Science.
Industry
Nvidia Deep Learning Institute (DLI) Ambassadors
Nvidia Deep Learning Institute (DLI) is looking for PhD students/academic faculty members who wish to be Ambassadors – certified on Nvidia courses, and who may run Nvidia courses free of charge at the universities (note – these courses are usually paid courses). Up until now there were 6 ambassadors from 3 universities in Israel, and the desire is to expand the local ambassador numbers. Running these courses at the university can be a great benefit for students and faculty – where courses vary from Fundamentals of DL to areas like NLP, Video Analytics, and more. Courses usually run as 1 day seminars.
For more information on Nvidia DLI and the Ambassador program see these two links below:
2021 Internships with the Facebook Core Data Science team
The Core Data Science team at Facebook Research is accepting applications for an intern position in London & Tel Aviv. They are looking for PhD students and postdocs with experience in one or more of the following fields: ML, Statistics, Computational Social Science, CS, Algorithmic Game Theory, Operations Research and adjacent areas. The internship programme consists of 12-16 weeks of full time paid work. Apply here:
The Council for Higher Education’s Planning and Budgeting Committee (VATAT) shared a report summarizing its Data Science Steering committee’s findings.
If you are starting your journey into the containerized world, the first thing you’ll come across is Docker. This Webinar will give you a quick start: it will provide you with the tools to play with Docker. Also you will get a glimpse to orchestration solutions like Kubernetes and Openshift.
Docker container technology separates applications from the underlying Operating System and infrastructure. Containers technology virtualizes the Operating System (OS), and thanks to it only the application, and specific dependencies like libraries and binaries are being packaged in the image. Starting such an image is much faster omitting start of an OS. In addition the image now is very portable among various host servers running the Docker engine.
What will you learn?
In this webinar you will learn the fundamentals and basic concepts of Containers, Docker, Kubernetes and OpenShift. The overview will be followed by a hands-on lab where you will get to build Docker images and run them.
Who should attend?
Developers and those interested in DevOps, IT, containers and application deployment.
The European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Systems offers an interdisciplinary PhD program. The ELLIS PhD program is a key element of the ELLIS initiative and its goal is to foster and educate the best talent in machine learning related research areas by pairing outstanding students with leading academic and industrial researchers in Europe. The program supports excellent PhDs across Europe by giving them access to leading research through boot camps, summer schools and workshops of the ELLIS programs. Every PhD student is supervised by one ELLIS fellow/scholar and one ELLIS member from a different country and conducts a 1 year exchange at the other location. ELLIS seeks to increase diversity and the number of women in areas where they are underrepresented and we explicitly encourage women to apply. We are committed to employing more handicapped individuals and especially encourage them to apply. Application website: apply.ellis.eu (portal will open on October 1st, 2020) Application deadline: December 1st, 2020, 23:59 CEST
There are a couple of open graduate students (PhD or MSc) positions in the Neural Interfaces lab lead by Prof. Izhar Bar-Gad:
Identification of involuntary movements from video: In a joint project with Schneider children’s hospital we collected videos from Tourette syndrome patients displaying involuntary facial movements (motor tics).
Research definition: Unsupervised learning algorithms for identifying repeating behavioral motifs from the video.
Identification of animal behavior from a kinematic timeseries: We record kinematic signals (accelerometer, gyroscope, magnetometer) from animals during natural behavior. This information is consequently used to decode the behavior and link it to brain activity.
Research definition: Unsupervised learning algorithms for identifying repeating behavioral motifs from the kinematic signals.
Required background: Machine learning, Time series analysis.
What will you learn?
Who should attend?
️ Speakers
Prior to the event