Speakers

Yonina Eldar

The dept. of Mathematics and Computer ScienceThe Weizmann Institute of Science

Bio:

Prof. Yonina C. Eldar is renowned for her pioneering contributions to signal processing and sampling theory. She currently serves as a Professor in the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science at the Weizmann Institute of Science, where she holds the Dorothy and Patrick Gorman Professorial Chair and leads the Center for Biomedical Engineering.

Prof. Eldar's innovative research has significantly advanced sub-Nyquist sampling techniques, enabling more efficient data acquisition across various applications, including medical imaging and communications. Her work has garnered numerous accolades, such as the IEEE Signal Processing Society Technical Achievement Award and the IEEE Kiyo Tomiyasu Award, underscoring her impact on the field.

Beyond her research, Prof. Eldar is dedicated to education and mentorship, having authored several influential books and over 475 journal articles. She is a member of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities and a Fellow of both IEEE and EURASIP, reflecting her esteemed standing in the scientific community.

Her leadership extends to various academic and professional committees, where she has played a pivotal role in shaping the future of signal processing and its applications. Prof. Eldar's commitment to advancing technology and fostering innovation continues to inspire researchers and practitioners worldwide

Title:

Model-based Learning

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Nadav Cohen

CTO, President & Co-FounderImubit & Tel Aviv University

Bio:

Nadav Cohen is an Assoc. Prof. of Computer Science at Tel Aviv University, and CTO, President & Co-Founder at Imubit. His academic research centers on the foundations of deep learning, while at Imubit he leads development of deep reinforcement learning systems controlling manufacturing plants. Nadav earned a BSc in electrical engineering and a BSc in mathematics (both summa cum laude) at the Technion. He obtained his PhD (summa cum laude) at the Hebrew University, and was a postdoc in Princeton. For his contributions, Nadav won a number of awards, including an ERC Grant and a Google Research Scholar Award.

Title:

Offline Reinforcement Learning in the Wild

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Ayellet Tal

ProfessorTechnion - Israel Institute of Technology

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Ayellet Tal is a professor and the Alfred and Marion Bär Chair in Engineering at the Technion's Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. She holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Princeton University and a B.Sc degree (Summa cum Laude) in Mathematics and Computer Science from Tel Aviv University. Among Prof. Tal’s accomplishments are the Rechler Prize for Excellence in Research, the Henry Taub Prize for Academic Excellence, and the Milton and Lillian Edwards Academic Lectureship. Prof. Tal has chaired several conferences on computer graphics, shape modeling, and computer vision, including the upcoming ICCV.

Title:

Point Cloud Visualization – Why and How?

Abstract:

A point cloud, which is a set of 3D positions, is a simple, efficient, and versatile representation of 3D data. Given a point cloud and a viewpoint, which points are visible from that viewpoint? Since points themselves do not occlude one another, the real question becomes: which points would be visible if the surface they were sampled from were known? In this talk we will explore why point visibility is important, not only in computer vision but also beyond, how it can be determined, and in particular, how it can be addressed within optimization or deep learning frameworks.

Yovav Meydad

Chief Strategy & Product OfficerMentee Robotics

Bio:

Yovav Meydad is the Chief Strategy and Product Officer at Mentee Robotics, leading the company’s product vision and strategic growth in the humanoid robotics industry. Previously, he served as the Chief Growth & Marketing Officer at Moovit (acquired in 2020 by Intel) where he helped scale the world’s leading transit app to over 1.5 billion users globally. With 20+ years of experience as a founder and product leader in venture-backed and public companies, Yovav also co-founded Pixplit and Hitpad and held leadership roles at Snap.com, Spark Networks, and AOL. He holds a B.Sc. in Information Systems Engineering from Ben Gurion University.

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Amit Bermano

Tel Aviv University

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Aya Soffer

IBM

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Title:

IBM Granite Vision – the journey to develop a large enterprise-focused Visual Language Model

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IBM has recently released a new family of Open-Source LLMs - Granite 3, focusing on enterprise use cases. In this keynote we talk about the development of the Visual Language Model member of this family -  IBM’s Granite Vision model -  developed by IBM Research in Israel and in the US. We describe the process of developing Granite Vision, and share insights and innovations from the different steps in this journey, such as data collection and generation, model training and evaluation, enterprise trust and safety requirements, and more. Additionally, We describe IBM's vision and future outlook on Large Vision Models and general Multimodal Models.

Daphna Laifenfeld

NeuroKaire

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Dean Leitersdorf

Co-Founder & CEO Decart

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Dean Leitersdorf grew up between Israel, Switzerland and Silicon Valley. Dean completed his PhD at the Technion at the age of 23, while serving in Unit 8200, and later completed his postdoc at NUS Singapore.

Dean won the ACM PODC Dissertation Award in 2023, for the best PhD in distributed computing worldwide. Additional awards include three best student paper awards at PODC, and the פרס ביטחון ישראל from the IDF.

Dean serves as CEO of Decart, an efficiency-focused AI research lab, which he founded in 2023 with his cofounder, Moshe Shalev. Decart burst out of stealth in October 2024 with its demo, Oasis- a real-time, generative AI video game world. Decart aims to become the leading consumer AI company by helping users transform their imagination into visual reality, blending interactive, generative AI experiences into everyday life.

 

Decart’s innovation lies in its groundbreaking AI platform, which reduces the cost of running and training AI models by ten times—a development that has put the company on the radar of global tech giants. Their platform delivers real-time generative capabilities that include creating fully playable AI-generated video game worlds. This marks a transformative step forward in AI infrastructure.

 

Within its first year, Decart has garnered significant backing from industry giants like Sequoia Capital and Benchmark, reflecting its transformative potential. The company’s rapid growth and innovative technology position it as a serious contender alongside industry leaders like OpenAI. Dean’s vision and leadership have been pivotal in this success, cementing his role as a key figure shaping the future of artificial intelligence.

Title:

Turning Israel into a Global Leader in Building Foundation Models for Computer Vision

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