General Program

Hadar Zeitlin
Chief Business Officer
Hailo

Bio

Hadar is CBO and Co-Founder of Hailo. Before this role, she served as the first Product Manager at Via Transportation, where she managed multiple core projects including the overseeing of algorithms and the development of products. She also brings a decade of technological experience from the IDF’ elite intelligence unit, where she served in various leadership positions, including Chief Architect and led the Unit’s flagship R&D project which was ultimately recognized with the General Chief of Staff Award for Technological Excellence.

Hadar holds a B.Sc. in Physics and Math from the Hebrew University and an MBA from Northwestern University and Tel Aviv University.

Abstract

As deep learning is showing potential value in different markets, there is an increasing need to be able to run inference efficiently on edge devices.

In this talk we will focus on the fundamental characteristics of deep learning algorithms, analyze the challenges they introduce to the classical 60 years old Von-Neuman processing approach and review the guidelines to building more efficient domain specific processing architecture.

Beginning with some theoretical reasoning behind domain-specific architectures and their implementation in the field of deep learning, and more specifically for machine vision applications. We will use various quantitative measures, and more detailed design examples in order to make a link between theory and practice.

Hailo has developed a specialized deep learning processor that delivers the performance of a data center-class computer to edge devices. Hailo’s AI microprocessor is the product of a rethinking of traditional computer architectures, enabling smart devices to perform sophisticated deep learning tasks such as imagery and sensory processing in real time with minimal power consumption, size and cost.

Tamar Rott Shaham
PhD Candidate, EE faculty
Technion

Bio

Tamar Rott Shaham is a PhD candidate at the Electrical Engineering faculty in the Technion - Israel Institute of Technology, under the supervision of Prof. Tomer Michaeli, where she also received her B.Sc. in 2015. Her research interests are in Image Processing and Computer Vision. Tamar won several awards including Adobe Research Fellowship (2020), ICCV 2019 Best Paper Award (Marr Prize), Google WTM Scholar (2019), The Israeli Higher Education Council Scholarship for Data Science PhD students, and the Schmidt Postdoctoral Award.

Abstract

"We introduce SinGAN, an unconditional generative model that can be learned from a single natural image. Our model is trained to capture the internal distribution of patches within the image, and is then able to generate high quality, diverse samples that carry the same visual content as the image. SinGAN contains a pyramid of fully convolutional GANs, each responsible for learning the patch distribution at a different scale of the image. This allows generating new samples of arbitrary size and aspect ratio, that have significant variability, yet maintain both the global structure and the fine textures of the training image. In contrast to previous single image GAN schemes, our approach is not limited to texture images, and is not conditional (i.e. it generates samples from noise). User studies confirm that the generated samples are commonly confused to be real images. We illustrate the utility of SinGAN in a wide range of image manipulation tasks."

Tal Ridnik
Senior Algorithm Researcher
Alibaba DAMO Israel Lab

Bio

Tal Ridnik is a Senior Algorithm Engineer and Researcher at the AutoML team in Alibaba DAMO Israel Lab. His research focuses on automating the process of training high-quality and efficient neural network models, making deep learning accessible to developers with limited machine learning expertise. Tal completed his B.Sc in physics and electrical engineering in the Technion, as a part of "Psagot" Program, and M.Sc in physics from the Ben-Gurion University. 

Hussam Lawen
Algorithm Engineer
Alibaba DAMO Academy Israel

Bio

Hussam is an Algorithm Engineer in Alibaba DAMO Israel Lab. Hussam enjoys doing applied research on pose estimation, person Re-Identification, and image classification. Prior to Alibaba, Hussam worked in several companies in the retail business as a senior android developer.
Hussam completed his B.Sc in tandem with high school studies as a part of "Etgar" program at the University of Haifa. 

Abstract

Cross-modal image retrieval allows using different types of query and user’s feedback into the visual search, such as text to image retrieval or text and image combination to image retrieval. A deep learning approach for learning the joint embeddings of images and text has shown impressive results in addressing this scenario. 

In this talk, we will present the latest trends for product visual search including the multi-modal scenarios and will provide some hands-on tips for effective results.

Nathan Cavaglione
Algorithm Engineer
DataGen Technologies

Bio

Nathan is an Algorithm Engineer at DataGen Technologies.
His research focuses on creating high quality simulated data for computer vision applications such as pose estimation.
Nathan previously worked at Intel as a Computer Vision Engineer and graduated Summa Cum Laude from Imperial College London with a MEng in Electrical Engineering and a thesis on Action Recognition. 

Abstract

In the computer vision industry, gathering and manually annotating data is the most substantial bottleneck in the development of deep learning solutions. A promising solution is to generate data through 3D simulations as they provide perfect annotations and densely sample edge cases that real datasets fail to capture. Yet, a known shortcoming of this method is the domain gap between the simulated and real world domains. We show it can be overcome through the mutual use of Photorealistic Simulation and Domain Adaptation. To validate our claim on a study case, we generated simulated datasets that achieve state-of-the-art performance for 2D hand joints estimation. In this talk, we will present this methodology as a base for solving practical computer vision challenges in a wide range of domains. 

Pavel Levin
Principal Data Scientist
Booking.com

Bio

Pavel Levin is a Principal Data Scientist at Booking.com, one of the world's leading digital travel platforms. Over the past five years with the company, he has worked on a number of important AI products, including the Booking Assistant (a customer service chatbot), an in-house machine translation engine, various recommendation and personalization applications and computer vision projects to create an even smoother, insightful and relevant experience on Booking.com. Trained as an applied mathematician, he has keen interest in all applied aspects of statistical models, learning algorithms and data science in general.

Abstract

In today's increasingly visual world of e-commerce products are often accompanied by photo galleries describing various product aspects. We are going to deep dive into the travel accommodations use case and discuss a deep learning-based solution to the problem of finding meaningful representations of hotel galleries in a large scale e-commerce setting. The universality of embeddings and their flexibility to new downstream tasks is achieved through training the gallery encoder on multiple independent tasks using multi-task learning (MTL) approach. To evaluate the role of MTL in gallery encoding we look at how the performance of the joint MTL-trained model on each task compares to the model performances of separately trained end-to-end models. To assess the quality of learned representations we mainly look at their performance in downstream applications.

Sefi Bell-Kligler
Deep learning Research Engineer
Deci.ai

Bio

This paper is my MSc. thesis at Weizmann Institute of science, got accepted to an oral presentation at NeurIPS 2019. Currently working as a deep learning research engineer at Deci.ai.

Abstract

Super-resolution (SR) methods typically assume that the low-resolution (LR) image was downscaled from the unknown high-resolution (HR) image by a fixed 'ideal' downscaling kernel (e.g. Bicubic downscaling). However, this is rarely the case in real LR images, in contrast to synthetically generated SR datasets. When the assumed downscaling kernel deviates from the true one, the performance of SR methods significantly deteriorates. This gave rise to Blind-SR - namely, SR when the downscaling kernel ("SR-kernel") is unknown. It was further shown that the true SR-kernel is the one that maximizes the recurrence of patches across scales of the LR image. In this paper we show how this powerful cross-scale recurrence property can be realized using Deep Internal Learning. We introduce "KernelGAN", an image-specific Internal-GAN, which trains solely on the LR test image at test time, and learns its internal distribution of patches. Its Generator is trained to produce a downscaled version of the LR test image, such that its Discriminator cannot distinguish between the patch distribution of the downscaled image, and the patch distribution of the original LR image. The Generator, once trained, constitutes the downscaling operation with the correct image-specific SR-kernel. KernelGAN is fully unsupervised, requires no training data other than the input image itself, and leads to state-of-the-art results in Blind-SR when plugged into existing SR algorithms.

Dr. Oren Freifeld
Senior Lecturer at the Computer Science Department
Ben-Gurion University

Bio

Oren Freifeld is a faculty member at BGU CS where he runs the Vision, Inference and Learning group. Previously, he was at MIT CSAIL (postdoc) and Brown University Applied Math (PhD).  During his PhD he was also a visiting student at Stanford EE and Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems. His current focus is on scalable Bayesian nonparametric methods and on geometric transformations in deep learning. He is particularly interested in problems such as: unsupervised or semi-supervised learning; clustering; video and motion analysis; statistical image models;  geometric distortions; data alignment; multi-sensor data.

Abstract

This talk will focus on geometric transformations in deep learning with applications in computer vision and time-series analysis. Particularly, I will discuss cases where the latent geometric distortions present in the data are well modeled/approximated via diffeomorphisms. Building on an efficient and highly-expressive family of diffeomorphisms [Freifeld et al., ICCV '15 & PAMI '17] as well as certain classical matrix groups, I will touch upon our recent works on diffeomorphic data augmentation [Hauberg et al., AISTATS '16], diffeomorphic transformer nets [Skafte-Detlefsen et al., CVPR '18, Shapira-Weber et al., NeurIPS '19], and on a moving-camera background model [Chelly et al., CVPR '20].

Sivan Doveh
Student Researcher, IBM
MSc Student, Tel Aviv University 

Bio

Sivan Doveh is a student researcher at the Computer Vision and Augmented Reality (CVAR) group at IBM Research AI.

She is also completed an MSc at Tel Aviv University under the supervision of Raja Giryes. Her research is focused on meta-learning.

Abstract

Network architecture search (NAS) achieves state-of-the-art results in various tasks such as classification and semantic segmentation. Recently, a reinforcement learning-based approach has been proposed for Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) search. In this work, we propose an alternative strategy for GAN search by using a proxy task instead of common GAN training. Our method is called DEGAS (Differentiable Efficient GenerAtor Search), which focuses on efficiently finding the generator in the GAN. Our search algorithm is inspired by the differential architecture search strategy and the Global Latent Optimization (GLO) procedure. This leads to both an efficient and stable GAN search.  After the generator architecture is found, it can be plugged into any existing framework for GAN training.

Tammy Riklin Raviv
Faculty Member, School of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Ben-Gurion University

Bio

Tammy Riklin Raviv is a faculty member in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering of Ben-Gurion University. Her main research interests are Computer Vision, Machine Learning and Biomedical Image Analysis. She is an associate editor at the IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging (TMI) Journal and a TC member at the IEEE Bio Imaging and Signal Processing (BISP) Committee. She holds a B.Sc. in Physics and an M.Sc. in Computer Science (both magna cum laude) from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She received her Ph.D. from the School of Electrical Engineering of Tel-Aviv University. During 2010-2012 she was a research fellow at Harvard Medical School and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. Prior to this (2008-2010) she was a post-doctorate associate in CSAIL, MIT.

Abstract

In this talk I will introduce a novel Deep Learning framework, which quantitatively estimates image segmentation quality without the need for human inspection or labeling. We refer to this method as a Quality Assurance Network - QANet. Specifically, given an image and a ‘proposed’ corresponding segmentation, obtained by any method including manual annotation, the QANet solves a regression problem in order to estimate a predefined quality measure (or example the IoU or a Dice score) with respect to the unknown ground truth. The QANet is by no means yet another segmentation method. Instead, it performs a multi-level, multi-feature comparison of an image-segmentation pair based on a unique network architecture, called the RibCage.

To demonstrate the strength of the QANet, we addressed the evaluation of instance segmentation using two different datasets from different domains, namely, high throughput live cell microscopy images from the Cell Segmentation Benchmark and natural images of plants from the Leaf Segmentation Challenge. While synthesized segmentations were used to train the QANet, it was tested on segmentations obtained by publicly available methods that participated in the different challenges. We show that the QANet accurately estimates the scores of the evaluated segmentations with respect to the hidden ground truth, as published by the challenges’ organizers.

• Yakov Miron
• Research Scientist
• Elbit Systems Aerospace
•  

Bio

Yakov Miron is a BScEE from Ben-Gurion university and an MScEE from Tel Aviv university.

He was working for Motorola Inc. and Silentium as an algorithm developer.

His current position is Computer Vision and Deep Learning Researcher in the R&D division at Elbit Systems Aerospace.

His interest topics are Machine Learning, Deep Learning, Computer Vision, 3D Modeling, as well as Navigation, Localization and SLAM.

Abstract

Computer Graphics images are commonly used in various fields like Medical imaging, gaming, animation, Augmented Reality and many more.

Contemporary Graphic Engines are able to produce scenes of limited photorealism.

In this talk, we will depict our method for generating visually appealing photorealistic images and temporally coherent videos from Computer generated scenes using Deep Learning.

Leonid Karlinsky
Senior Research Scientist, Research Team Lead
IBM Research AI

Bio

Leonid Karlinsky leads the CV & DL research team in the Computer Vision and Augmented Reality (CVAR) group @ IBM Research AI. Before joining IBM, he served as a research scientist in Applied Materials, Elbit, and FDNA. He is actively publishing and reviewing at ECCV, ICCV, CVPR and NeurIPS, and is serving as an IMVC steering committee member for the past 3 years. His recent research is in the areas of few-shot learning with specific focus on object detection, metric learning, and example synthesis methods. He received his PhD degree at the Weizmann Institute of Science, supervised by Prof. Shimon Ullman.

Abstract

In this talk we will discuss our recent advances in few-shot learning, a regime where only a handful of training examples (maybe just one) are available for learning novel categories unseen during training. We will cover a method for few-shot classification that is capable of matching and localizing instances of novel categories, despite being trained and used with only category level image labels and without any location supervision, also opening the door for weakly supervised few-shot detection. We will cover a method for meta-learning a model that automatically modifies its architecture to better adapt to novel few-shot tasks. Finally, we will discuss the limitation of the current few-shot learning methods when handling extreme cases of domain transfer, and offer a new benchmark and some ideas towards cross-domain few-shot learning.

Alex Golts
Computer Vision Research Engineer
Rafael

Bio

Alex is an algorithm engineer and researcher at the computer vision department in Rafael. He works on deep learning approaches with applications including change detection, scene understanding, image compression and 3D reconstruction.

Alex completed his M.Sc in Electrical Engineering at the Technion, and B.Sc in Physics and Electrical Engineering at the Tel-Aviv University.

Abstract

Given a pair of images of the same geographic area taken at different times, we wish to detect changes between them. Change detection is a challenging task. It is required to distinguish between fundamental changes, often man made, and insignificant natural ones. The latter may result from changing lighting, weather, camera pose, slight vegetation movement due to wind, and small errors in image registration. We address the change detection problem by training a learned descriptor using registered image pairs. Our fully convolutional CNN-based descriptor can efficiently detect changes in large aerial image pairs. It is shown to generalize well for a completely new scene and type of changes, while being robust to registration errors. The labeling of each image pair as similar or different is implied by the automatic registration process. Therefore, no manual annotation of any kind is required. While the lack of supervision results in label noise, the algorithm proves highly robust to it.

Ovadya Menadeva
Algorithm Department Manager
Percepto 

Bio

Ovadya joined Percepto on January 2019 as a Computer Vision team leader. With over 20 years of experience building Computer Vision solutions in the industry

with companies such as Intel Corporation, Applied Materials and PointGrab. Ovadya’s last position was with Innoviz-Tech, headed the Computer Vision department. Ovadya set the foundation for the Innoviz-Tech Computer Vision department, including defining the computer vision product specs Ovadya has vast experience in Computer Vision applications, including Deep learning, Object detection and tracking in mass production such as Samsung TV.

Ovadya holds an Msc. degree in the field of computer vision from the Weizmann Institute of Science.

Abstract

Monitoring large areas is presently feasible with high resolution drone cameras, as opposed to time-consuming and expensive ground surveys. In this work we reveal for the first time, the potential of using a state-of-the-art change detection GAN based algorithm with high resolution drone images for infrastructure inspection. We demonstrate this concept on solar panel installation. A deep learning, data-driven algorithm for identifying changes based on a change detection deep learning  algorithm was proposed. We use the Conditional Adversarial Network approach to present a framework for change detection in images. The proposed network architecture is based on pix2pix GAN framework. Extensive experimental results have shown that our proposed approach outperforms the other state-of-the-art change detection methods.

Dr. Amir Handelman
Senior Lecturer at Faculty of Electrical Engineering
Holon Institute of Technology

Bio

Dr. Amir Handelman received his BSc, MSc and PhD degrees in Electrical Engineering in 2008, 2011 and 2014, respectively, all from Tel-Aviv University, Israel. In 2014, Amir joined the faculty of Electrical Engineering in Holon Institute of Technology (HIT) as a tenure-track faculty member and established there the Applied Optics and Machine Vision Lab. In addition to his academic background, Amir has over 10 years' experience in computer vision and optics, which he gained during his works in several Hi-Tech companies, such as Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI), Volume-Elements Ltd., and KLA-Tencor.

Abstract

Today, there is an increasing desire by patients and hospital managers to make trainings for residents and surgeons before performing actual operations. This desire made modern surgery syllabus to include use of simulators for improving surgical skills in teaching programs. In this talk I will review our computerized algorithms aim to score the performance of laparoscopic cutting and suturing operation in both general surgery and ophthamology medical fields . Using our algorithms, human assessment is not necessary and the quality of the surgery outcomes is objectively evaluated. 

Leah Bar
MaxQ-AI and Tel Aviv University

Bio

Leah Bar holds B.Sc. in Physics, M.Sc. in Bio-Medical Engineering and PhD in Electrical Engineering from Tel-Aviv University.
She worked as a post-doctoral fellow in the Department of Electrical Engineering at the University of Minnesota.
She is currently a senior researcher at MaxQ-AI, a medical AI start-up, and in addition a researcher at the Mathematics Department in Tel-Aviv University.
Her research interest are: machine learning, image processing, computer vision and variational methods.

Abstract

We introduce a novel neural network-based partial differential equations solver for forward and inverse problems. The solver is grid free, mesh free and shape free, and the solution is approximated by a neural network.
We employ an unsupervised approach such that the input to the network is a points set in an arbitrary domain, and the output is the set of the corresponding function values. The network is trained to minimize deviations of the learned function from the PDE solution and satisfy the boundary conditions.
The resulting solution in turn is an explicit smooth differentiable function with a known analytical form.
Unlike other numerical methods such as finite differences and finite elements, the derivatives of the desired function can be analytically calculated to any order. This framework therefore, enables the solution of high order non-linear PDEs. The proposed algorithm is a unified formulation of both forward and inverse problems where the optimized loss function consists of few elements: fidelity terms of L2 and L infinity norms, boundary and initial conditions constraints, and additional regularizers. This setting is flexible in the sense that regularizers can be tailored to specific problems. We demonstrate our method on several free shape 2D second order systems with application to Electrical Impedance Tomography (EIT). 

• Dr. Elad Levi
  Senior Machine Learning Researcher
  Nexar
•  

Bio

Elad Levi is a machine learning researcher at Nexar, a startup aiming to create a real-time traffic network for shaping the future of mobility. His work focuses on leveraging Nexar's large-scale datasets of real-world driving environments to mapping and automotive safety applications. Elad received a PhD degree in mathematics from the Hebrew University. His thesis was in the field of model-theoretic with applications to combinatorics problems. 

Abstract

Building fresh accurate maps of road items is a key ingredient in smart cities management and enabling fully autonomous vehicles. Building such maps from chip sensors such as monocular camera, GPS sensor and IMU, is a major challenge. It is even harder doing it in crowdsourcing setting, where the data is noisy and the camera position is arbitrary and unknown.

In this talk, we address this problem and related issues, namely; Camera alignment, self-localization, depth estimation, etc’. We demonstrate that using self-supervised approaches along with large corpus of diverse noisy-unlabeled data, we can get surprisingly accurate results.

Adi Szeskin
AI & Data Science Researcher
Intel

Bio

Adi is a member of the core AI & data science research team of Intel’s Advanced Analytics group (Deep learning, NLP and computer vision research for sales and marketing, manufacturing, healthcare), in parallel to PhD research at the Hebrew University’s Computer Science department, supervised by Prof. Leo Joskowicz.

Adi holds an M.Sc in Bio-Engineering, an M.E. in Bio-Medical Engineering and a B.Sc in Electronics engineering.

Abstract

We present a deep learning system for testing graphics units by detecting novel visual corruptions in videos. Unlike previous work in which manual tagging was required to collect labeled training data, our weak supervision method is fully automatic and needs no human labelling. This is achieved by reproducing driver bugs that increase the probability of generating corruptions, and by making use of ideas and methods from the Multiple Instance Learning (MIL) setting. In our experiments, we significantly outperform self-supervised methods such as GAN-based models and discover novel corruptions undetected by baselines, while adhering to strict requirements on accuracy and efficiency of our real-time system.

Jeff Mather
Engineering Manager – Image Processing
MathWorks

Bio

Jeff Mather is a senior software engineer and the development manager of the Image Processing Toolbox. He has managed the team since 2013 and has developed features for the toolbox and MATLAB since 2000, particularly in the area of file formats, medical image processing, HDR imaging, color science, and software performance optimization. He has an undergraduate degree in mathematics from Grinnell College and a Master of Software Engineering from Brandeis University. He has been with MathWorks since 1998.

Abstract

We will explore the challenges of processing very large pathology images and present a framework to solve problems in segmentation, feature extraction, measurement, and labeling. The solution exploits multiple resolution levels, parallelism, and conditional processing. Special attention is given to using deep convolutional neural networks.