The DSI at BIU would like to recognize and reward exceptional work in the area of data science that resulted in a significant contribution to the field. The award will be open to all students in the university who have recently published an academic publication in the field of data science in a top-tier peer-reviewed venue. This is a unique opportunity for BIU students to receive recognition for their hard work.
The Outstanding Publication Awards will be provided in the form of a scholarship. The scholarships are intended to support and encourage students to continue their academic pursuits in data science.
The DSI has allocated a total of up to 50K NIS for scholarships of 1,000 to 4,000 NIS each. The applications will be reviewed by a panel of experts from the Data Science Institute, and the winners will be announced at the DSI retreat that will take place in June 2023. The total number of scholarships and the individual scholarship amounts will be determined based on the quality and significance of the publications.
Eligibility Criteria and Limitations
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 in the academic year of TASHPAG.
The call is open to any publication (e.g. journal or conference paper) in the field of data science in a top-tier peer-reviewed venue. The publication date (the date used for citation purposes) must be from the current academic year – i.e. Oct 1, 2022 – Sep 30, 2023.
An applicant must be one of the authors of the publication.
Students may submit multiple applications (each for a different publication), however, the total award per student is limited to 4,000 NIS.
In the case that a single publication has multiple eligible authors, these authors can apply separately, however, this co-authorship will be taken into account when the committee decides on the scholarship amount.
Submission Guidelines and Process
The application should be submitted by the student via the following form:
Name of applicant, name of BIU advisor(s), publication reference and URL.
Deadline for submission: June 11, 2023.
The awards will be announced at the DSI retreat that will take place in mid June 2023.
If you have published an academic paper in the area of data science, we strongly encourage you to apply for the DSI Outstanding Publication Awards. This is an excellent opportunity for you to gain recognition for your work, and we look forward to receiving your applications.
The Data Science Institute (DSI) at Bar Ilan University is an academic-research institute, whose mission is to promote scientific research in data science and the use of data science methods in all research fields in the academy and the industry. The institute works to integrate the use of data science in research in the various faculties and in the future aims to provide research and consulting services to the industry.
We are looking for an institute manager who will lead to the next stage in the expansion of the Institute’s activities in both academy and industry.
The DSI Manager will promote DS research across all university faculties, with emphasis on social and humanities, and will seek and promote industrial collaboration and research services for the industry.
As the DSI manager you will
Lead the DSI team (computing, admin, DS research personnel, academic)
Take part in the annual planning with the director/steering committee and be in charge of plan execution managerial and financial
Develop external connections and communication: seek and promote academic collaboration, including initiation and support for joint grant proposals, promote the DSI in the media and provide research services and support
Develop profitable services of consulting and research in the industry
Requirements:
Educational background: A master’s or doctoral degree in a field related to data science, e.g., computer science, statistics, math, etc.
Relevant work experience: Experience in a related field, such as data analysis, machine learning, etc.
Proven experience in team management.
Research and publication: Experience conducting and publishing research in the field of data science with business experience – desirable
Experienced in organizational change implementation – desirable
For DSI manager position you will need:
Strong leadership skills and the ability to manage a diverse team. Experience with project management and the ability to prioritize tasks and delegate responsibilities effectively are also important.
A deep understanding of data science concepts and techniques, as well as experience with relevant tools and programming languages such as Python, R, SQL, and machine learning frameworks.
Excellent communication and interpersonal skills, with the ability to work collaboratively with other departments, faculty, and staff. The ability to communicate complex technical concepts to non-technical stakeholders is also desirable.
We are thrilled to announce that Professor Onn Shehory has taken over the role of Director of the Data Science Institute. Professor Shehory has an impressive track record of research in artificial intelligence, multi-agent systems, and machine learning, and we are excited to see him bring his expertise to the Institute.
As Director, Professor Shehory will lead the Institute in its mission to advance the understanding and application of data science. His vision for the Institute is to continue building a strong research community that produces cutting-edge research in data science, fosters collaboration with industry partners, and trains the next generation of data scientists.
We would also like to take a moment to express our deep gratitude to Professor Ido Dagan for his significant contributions as Director. During his tenure, Professor Dagan has led the Institute to new heights and spearheaded initiatives that have had a lasting impact on the field of data science. We are immensely grateful for his leadership, dedication, and passion for data science.
With Professor Shehory at the helm, we are excited for the future of the Data Science Institute and the continued advancements in the field of data science. Please join us in welcoming Professor Shehory to his new role and in thanking Professor Dagan for his exceptional service to the Institute.
Welcome Yoel Shitrit
We would also like to welcome Yoel Shitrit who has recently joined the DSI and is responsible for managing the computing services offered by the Institute. Yoel has a rich IT background of over 25 years serving as technical leader and manager in multiple global and multinational companies. Yoel completed the CIO senior management course at the Technion and is studying for a Bachelor’s degree in Law (LL.B ) at College of Management.
Yoel will be working closely with BIU’s ICT Dept., the DSI members and the numerous users of the DSI cluster to improve the Institute’s offerings and services.
Events
Reminder: All past and upcoming events are posted on the DSI website.
Upcoming Events
DSI Dinner – March 13, 2023
We are glad to invite you to our annual dinner event that will take place on March 13, 2023 17:00-20:00 at BIU’s Brain Research Center hall. The event is open to all BIU researchers interested in data science including faculty, postdoctoral fellows, graduate students, BIU alumni and friends of the DSI. This will be an opportunity for us all to meet, learn about recent research activities and enjoy a dinner event.
Agenda will include: short talks by 3 of the 2020 DSI grant recipients and a keynote talk by Prof. Dafna Shahaf from HUJI followed by a festive poster session and dinner. For full event details see: https://dsi.biu.ac.il/event/dsi-dinner-march-13-2023/ .
Call for Posters: We invite poster presentations on recent work in all areas of data science. We accept both published and unpublished work, provided that it represents recent and original work of interest to our audience.
Please:
Register in the following form https://dsi.biu.ac.il/2023-dinner-registration (as we need to know the expected number of attendees in advance to properly plan the catering and other logistics)
You are invited to a special event hosted by Mictrosoft on tools for academic research on the cloud. The event will take place on 13.3.23 and is open for academic researchers. For further details and registration see here.
Past Events
BISFAI 2023
The 16th Bar-Ilan Symposium on Foundations of Artificial Intelligence, BISFAI 2023, took place during the first two days of February at Bar-Ilan University and was partially supported by the DSI. The program included a keynote talk by Prof. Gal Chechik on “Talk about images: Learn to reason about the perceived world” as well as many other talks by other DSI members.
IDSI Conference – January 2023
The Second International Israel Data Science Initiative Conference took place this last January in Ein-Gedi. Many speakers and participants from BIU attended the successful conference. The DSI provided financial support to attend the conference to 24 faculty members and students who presented their work at the event. Prof. Ido Dagan gave a keynote talk titled: “Beyond End-to-End:Regaining transparency and control through Task and Representation Decomposition”.
The DSI Member Retreat 2022
On 13-14 of June 2022, 50 faculty members from across BIU gathered in the Jerusalem hills at the Yearim Hotel for two packed-full days to meet and discuss data-science. The DSI-member retreat offered an opportunity to get together and get a glimpse of the overall picture of the data-science scene at BIU.
We are looking forward to seeing you all again for this academic year’s retreat planned for June 2023 and that will be open to DSI faculty members and their graduate students.
DSI Support
Support for data science events
If you are a DSI member and are planning or organizing a data science event in TASHPAG and are seeking support – we may be able to. Please send any such request to dsi@biu.ac.il.
DSI Call for Travel Grants 2023
The DSI provides travel grants on a competitive basis to encourage the active participation of students in major scientific international events. Grants are provided for presenting a novel scientific paper in major conferences/workshops, primarily in the core DS areas. Application is open for travel that will take place until the end of TASHPAG. Eligible BIU students are welcome to apply. For call details see: https://dsi.biu.ac.il/dsi-call-for-travel-grants-2023/.
Computing
DSI Storage
The DSI central storage solution provides disk space to the DSI cluster users. It provides an efficient solution for users home directories, lab directories, public data sets and temporary working data. If you or your lab require additional storage space please enquire at DSI Tech Support dsitech.support@biu.ac.il.
Oracle Research Grants
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 through a program of direct support and community engagement. Direct Support is achieved through the provision of Oracle for Research grants.
In TASHPB, the Data Science Institute circulated a call to its members for data science projects.
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 full list of accepted grants is available on the DSI website.
Congrats to the winners and we are looking forward to learning about their progress in upcoming DSI dinner events.
Walla article on Dr. Ayal Hendel’s European consortium project on applying genetic editing to cure sickle cell disease.
Congrats
PhD VATAT Scholarship winners, TASHPAB (3 out of 10 nationally granted scholarships):
Avi Caciularu (Computer Science)
Idan Achituve (Engineering)
Roni Cohen-Fultheim (Life Sciences)
DSI PhD Scholarship winners (TASHPAB):
Amit Gilboa (Engineering)
Omer Goldman (Computer Science)
Arie Cattan (Computer Science)
This year’s Rector’s Prize for Scientific Innovation – 3 DSI members among winners:
Prof. Asaf Peer (Physics)
Prof. Yuval Feldman (Law)
Dr. Avi Shmidman (The Department for Literature of the Jewish People)
Sanhedrai Hillel (PhD student under supervision of Shlomo Havlin and Baruch Barzel) for winning this year’s VATAT’s data science post doctoral scholarship.
Dr. Avi Shmidman for winning a ten million euro ERC Synergy grant to develop computational analysis that will enable full-text search of the entire corpus of medieval Hebrew manuscripts and revolutionize Jewish studies.
Dr. Ayal Hendel for winning a 6 million euro European Consortium grant on genetic editing.
Prof. Onn Shehory on being named a Senior Member of IEEE
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:
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:
The publication details: Name of Venue, title of talk, abstract and names of co-authors
Abstract
Acceptance approval
Travel dates (travel must take place during 2023)
Rough budget plan:
Total Budget – itemized
Indicate amount requested from DSI.
List of other funding sources (if applicable).
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).
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:
Cloud related topics supported by Oracle Cloud Architects
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:
PIs
Title
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.
