The Technion’s story has been intertwined with Israel’s for more than a century, from laying the foundations for a new nation to shaping its future.
Many medical studies record a patient’s race using only the broad categories from the U.S. Census, which may conceal racial health disparities, a new study reports. Researchers evaluated the performance of clinical risk scores for people of different races in an emergency department (ED). A clinical risk score summarizes the severity of a patient’s symptoms into a single number – the higher the score, the greater the risk of severe health outcomes. The researchers looked at broad race categories, like “Asian,” and more specific subgroups, like “Chinese” and “Indian.” The risk scores performed much better for some subgroups than others,…
When clinical pathologists look at images of cells from a patient biopsy, they perceive things the rest of us cannot. Where we see bright pink blobs and dots of purplish blue, they can make out the hallmarks of cancerous disease. But show the same images to a computer souped up with artificial intelligence in Professor Ron Kimmel’s Geometric Image Processing Lab at the Technion, and it can discern data that is invisible even to the most highly trained human eye. The Technion is the top-ranked institution for machine learning in Europe and the Middle East. Prof. Kimmel’s group is investigating…
Evan Jordan can tell when you are stressed, even though he’s never met or interacted with you. An assistant professor of health and wellness design at Indiana University’s School of Public Health-Bloomington, Jordan and his team use GPS tracking to find connections between a person’s environment and their mental health. The data could be stunningly revealing. Why? Because where we are in the world and how much we move is a big indicator of our mental health. Studies suggest that if we take a lot of walks to the park, we’re statistically less likely to have anxiety and depression. If…
Dr. Martin and Grace Rosman have long supported Technion students by providing scholarships, funds for student reservists, dormitory housing, and the highly successful Rosman-Atidim Program, which gives disadvantaged youth the chance to attend the Technion. Once again, Technion students are at the forefront of the couple’s vision and generosity as they establish a new computer center for state-of-art supercomputing. The Rosmans laid the ceremonial cornerstone for the Martin and Grace Druan Rosman Performance Computer Data Center during the Technion Board of Governors meeting in June. “The need for very fast computers is growing exponentially and it is very difficult to…
Colony collapse disorder, a phenomenon where bees die for mysterious reasons, caused alarm in recent decades and spurred a flurry of “save the bees” campaigns — because honeybees are needed to pollinate the plants that provide our food. But the bigger problem, according to Emily Speiser, VP of marketing for BloomX, is that honeybees, which have become the default bee for pollination in commercial agriculture because they’re easier to transport and manage — is that they aren’t as efficient as wild bees in pollinating specific fruits and vegetables like blueberries and avocados. In addition, says Speiser, there aren’t enough honeybees as…
Personal sensing data could help monitor and alleviate stress among resident physicians, although privacy concerns over who sees the information and for what purposes must be addressed, according to collaborative research from Cornell Tech. Burnout in all types of workplaces is on the rise in the U.S., where the “Great Resignation” and “silent quitting” have entered the lexicon in recent years. This is especially true in the health care industry, which has been strained beyond measure due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Stress is physical as well as mental, and evidence of stress can be measured through the use of smartphones, wearables…
A pair of scientists has produced a research paper in less than an hour with the help of ChatGPT — a tool driven by artificial intelligence (AI) that can understand and generate human-like text. The article was fluent, insightful and presented in the expected structure for a scientific paper, but researchers say that there are many hurdles to overcome before the tool can be truly helpful. The goal was to explore ChatGPT’s capabilities as a research ‘co-pilot’ and spark debate about its advantages and pitfalls, says Roy Kishony, a biologist and data scientist at the Technion — Israel Institute of Technology in…
US gaming and computer graphics giant Nvidia has joined forces with an Israeli startup to roll out a new hardware system to connect the quantum computer with classical computers. The new system, Nvidia DGX Quantum, built together with Israel’s Quantum Machines, a developer of a standard universal language for quantum computers, is expected to be first deployed at Israel’s quantum computing research center at the end of this year. The quantum computing R&D center funded by the Israel Innovation Authority at an investment of NIS 100 million ($27 million), which is headed by Quantum Machines, was established to help Israel build a…
What’s your password? The question makes most of us cringe because we all have a gazillion passwords for banking, shopping and everything else we do online. But with passkeys, there’s nothing to remember or type in. Touching our finger or showing our face to a device for authentication is so much easier. And it is safer, too, says Tal Zamir, CTO of Tel Aviv-based Perception Point, whose software detects, investigates and remediates any kind of hack attack across a company’s email, web browsers and cloud collaboration channels.
AI-powered writing assistants such as ChatGPT are creeping into everything from office tools to search tools – but using them actually puts ideas into people’s heads. Researchers found that people using an AI writing tool programmed with one idea (that social media is good, for example) are twice as likely to write a paragraph agreeing with the assistant. Maurice Jakesch of Cornell University asked more than 1,500 participants to write a paragraph answering the question, “Is social media good for society?” People who used an AI writing assistant that was biassed for or against social media were twice as likely to write a…
A computer that stores and processes data in a single chip is able to tell apart different people’s handwriting. Professor Shahar Kvatinsky, of the Technion, in Haifa, says combining its RAM and CPU allows it to function much more like a human brain, and opens up a whole new world of opportunities. To demonstrate its capabilities, he and his team presented the chip with different examples of handwritten letters. The chip learned which one was which with each example, and achieved a 97 per cent accuracy in recognition. “We like to describe a computer as a ‘brain’, but entirely separate…
Bees are crucial to our survival. Did you know they pollinate one in every three bites of food we eat? Or that without bees, more than 100,000 species of plants would become extinct? But bees are in danger, as more than half of just North America’s native bee species are declining in size with a quarter of the 4,000 species at risk of extinction. In the hopes of combating this global problem, Israeli startup BeeHero – led in part by Co-founder, CTO, and Technion alumnus Yuval Regev – is using sensors to monitor beehive health and conducting bee-related research. BeeHero’s…