14 outstanding researchers from Bar-Ilan University received the Rector's Award for Scientific Innovation this week.
The Rector's Prize for Scientific Innovation is awarded for the second year to groundbreaking researchers. The award ceremony, held on Wednesday, was attended by the researchers, their families, students and colleagues.
The researchers who won the Rector's Prize for Scientific Innovation this year are: Dr. Shiri Alon and Dr. Gabriela Geyer from the Department of Economics, Prof. Ido Dagan from the Department of Computer Science, Prof. Haim Cohen from the Faculty of Life Sciences, Prof. Nir Lev from the Department of Mathematics, Prof. Eliyahu Slutkin from the Department for physics, Prof. Avraham Faust from the Department of AI Studies and Archaeology, Prof. Avi Zadok from the Faculty of Engineering, Prof. Gal Kaminka and Dr. Noah Agmon from the Department of Computer Science, Prof. Edward Grinstein from the Department of Bible, Prof. David Haneshka from the Department of Talmud and resident Prof. Sharon Amron - Lotem from the Department of Linguistics and English Literature, Prof. Michal Zion from the School of Education.
The ceremony was opened by Prof. Daniel Hershkowitz, President of Bar-Ilan University, who congratulated the award winners and said: "It is a great pleasure to look at the scientific team and I wish you that God will continue to give you the strength to be a source of pride and glory not only for Bar-Ilan University but To the whole world and you will be blessed."
Prof. Miriam Faust, Rector of Bar-Ilan University said, "Many nominations were submitted this year and the selected group is a source of great pride. The researchers chosen today see things like everyone else, but also differently. Every fine work has a connection to reality and in addition there is a new floor with a different perspective and you have to be able to live in this duality which is not an easy challenge."
Prof. Aryeh Tsavan, Vice President for Research at Bar-Ilan University, blessed the winning researchers: "Imagination, creativity and innovation are what advance humanity and march it towards the highest peaks. It is a long effort, most of it Sisyphean, sometimes it is gray, but when the spark happens there is nothing like it and the feeling that goes with it. Our university operates as an ensemble and thus the Bar-Ilan ensemble of researchers assumes, through partnership, layers of knowledge, scientific developments, technological developments, heritage, history, research methods and more.
Prof. Eduard Greenstein, the representative of the winning researchers from the Department of Bible, congratulated on behalf of the award recipients "We do not work hard to receive an award, and not everyone who deserves an award receives one, but it is good and nice to receive recognition, when we know how much we have invested and how many unsuccessful attempts and how many failed experiments We invested, until we produced studies that were worthy of publication."
The reasons for the researchers winning the Rector's Award for Innovation
Dr. Shiri Alon and Dr. Gabriela Geyer
The award is given to Dr. Shiri Alon and Dr. Gabriela Geyer, from the Department of Economics, for publishing an article dealing with the decisions of social planners and the question of how these are based on the preferences of the individuals who make up society. The importance of the article is that, unlike previous articles in the literature, the article does not assume that social planners and individuals in society necessarily decide in the same way. Since social planners are responsible for the well-being of all individuals in society, the article assumes that they must exercise caution in making decisions, unlike individual individuals, whose decisions only affect themselves.
Prof. Ido Dagan
The prize is awarded to Prof. Ido Dagan, from the Department of Computer Science, for developing a new schema for the representation of knowledge that appears in a large number of texts, which include both redundancy regarding the same facts as well as supplementary details and descriptions at different levels of detail. During 2016, Prof. Dagan with his students and a number of partners published 9 articles at conferences regarding components of this scheme, with 7 of the articles at first-class conferences in the community, one of them was awarded Outstanding paper at the leading conference in the field (less than a percent of the articles sent to the conference) and another article was awarded Best paper award at a secondary conference. The new scheme was presented in an invited lecture at an international conference held in the Czech Republic. The research was partially supported by a DIP grant with partners from Germany as well as by the Magnet Consortium in Israel.
Prof. Haim Cohen
The award is given to Prof. Haim Cohen, from the Faculty of Life Sciences, for finding a new control mechanism for extending life expectancy and quality of life. Despite the considerable increase in human life expectancy in the last century, the quality of the old man's life has hardly changed. As the article in Ecclesiastes says, "Years came when you said, I have no desire in them." As a result, the company faces a series of social, economic and health challenges. Together with his students, Prof. Cohen proved that overexpression of the SIRT6 protein causes a longer life in mammals and a significant delay in the development of age-related diseases such as inflammation and diabetes. In addition, they deciphered the mechanism through which SIRT6 maintains a healthy liver, suppresses fat accumulation and prevents liver cancer. These findings have great potential for global change by developing drugs to prevent age-related diseases and turning the adult population into a contributing and active group.
Prof. Nir Lev
The prize is awarded to Prof. Nir Lev, from the Department of Mathematics, for his research, dealing with the spectral theory and periodic and non-periodic sequences of space, which matured in the last year to the solution of the Fuglede conjecture (in the three-dimensional case) and the development of a mathematical theory of semi-crystals (quasi-crystals). For his work, he won an ERC grant from the European Union and the international "Computational Methods and Function Theory (CMFT) Young Researcher Award". Awarded once every four years, and includes besides the monetary award an invitation to give a keynote lecture at the CMFT conference. It is not necessary to mention the central status that the mathematical community attributes to the solution of famous and old conjectures, especially those that senior mathematicians have invested their energy in. Solving such problems almost without exception expresses significant progress in the understanding of the field, which stems not only from the answer to the original question, but more so from the new tools that have been developed in order to be able to attack it successfully.
Prof. Eliyahu Slutskin
The prize is awarded to Prof. Eliyahu Slutskin, from the Department of Physics, for discovering liquid droplets that spontaneously take the form of pions and deciphering the basic physical mechanism of this phenomenon. The phenomenon is new and unexpected. Until now, only spherical liquid droplets were known. This shape transition is controlled by the temperature. The shape of the droplet is determined by the topological properties of a monomolecular nanocrystalline layer, which is formed spontaneously on the surface of the droplet, while the droplet itself remains liquid. This unique phenomenon makes it possible to study the elasticity of the nano layers. These measurements can open a porthole to a new theory of elasticity, which is suitable for the scale of single molecules. The discovered phenomenon may shed light on the physics of morphogenesis, and enable the creation of nano-pawns with controlled geometry - the building blocks for the materials of the future.
Prof. Sharon Aramon-Lotam
The award is given to Prof. Sharon Amron-Lotem, from the Department of Linguistics and English Literature, for her leading research in the diagnosis of language impairments in a bilingual preschool age population in Israel and within the framework of a European research network she established in 2009. Her research makes it possible to distinguish at the structural level and at the level of linguistic processing between language characteristics of normal bilingual development and those of a specific language impairment that requires clinical intervention. Her groundbreaking article published this year in the International Journal of Language and Communication Disorders. Shows the feasibility of an optimal diagnostic tool in the second language of bilingual children (90% accuracy). This is a research contribution that completely changes the diagnostic paradigm, since the existing tools reach an accuracy of less than 50% in the second language and lead to an overdiagnosis of language impairment among bilingual children.
Prof. Abraham Faust
The award is given to Prof. Avraham Faust, from the Department of AI Studies and Archaeology, for his extensive scientific work and especially for his revolutionary and ground-breaking research, which gives archaeologists a simple and effective tool, which will perfect the archaeological survey in the field. The study - one of the products of Prof. Faust's excavation and survey project at Tel Aiton - was conducted together with Yair Sapir and published in Advances in Archaeological Practice (the journal of the American Archaeological Association, the best platform for this type of research). The article presents a new archaeological survey method, based on testing the contents of rat mounds. The method is more accurate than a normal foot survey, much cheaper and faster than all the alternatives (such as a digging survey, etc.), and can be applied almost all over the world. The article presents some of the insights of the research, including the discovery and identification of the Tel Aiton underground city. This city was not discovered in the conventional surveys. Detection was made possible by applying the new method. The excavation carried out following the survey confirmed what was learned from the examination of the rat mounds.
Prof. Avi Zadok
The award is given to Prof. Avi Zadok, from the Faculty of Engineering, for his work in researching the phenomena of light and sound wave propagation in optical fibers and nanotechnological devices for communication purposes and sensors. In XNUMX, the research group under his leadership found a solution to a decades-old problem in the field of optical sensors. On the one hand, optical measurement requires bringing the light into contact with the tested medium. On the other hand, standard optical fibers are designed to prevent the light traveling inside them from escaping. With the use of effectives that combine light and sound waves, the research group was able to realize an optical sensor for detecting chemicals outside the fiber, even though the light does not "see" the substance being tested at all. In XNUMX, Prof. Zadok won the prestigious ERC grant from the European Union. Prof. Zadok is a member of the Young Israeli Academy of Sciences
Prof. Gal Kaminka and Dr. Noa Agmon
The award is given to Prof. Gal Kaminka and Dr. Noa Agmon, from the Department of Computer Science, for developing a revolutionary approach in which the doctor can program existing robots for new treatments without needing to manually design new robots. Instead, the doctor uses a programming language developed to describe the medical process, and dedicated software, built as part of the research, adapts generic templates of nanorobots to the programmed treatment. The software actually creates a swarm of nano-robots that carry out the programmed medical process. First results showing feasibility in computer and in vitro experiments were published for the first time this year in prestigious computer science and nanotechnology forums.
