Go far, go deep

Ezra and Scarlett Mord from Tel Aviv have reason to be proud: this week their sons Amir and Tomer received their Ph.D. together from the Technion, after completing three degrees in the Electrical Engineering Faculty at the Technion

Ezra and Scarlett Mord from Tel Aviv have reason to be proud: this week their sons Amir and Tomer received their Ph.D. degrees together from the Technion, after completing three degrees in the Faculty of Electrical Engineering at the Technion.

Ezra Mord graduated in 1962 with a bachelor's degree in aeronautics and space engineering at the Technion, and went on to a long and varied career in the defense field. Among other things, he held senior positions in the Kafir and the Levi projects. In 1996, his friend Amir and together with Leonid Yavitz founded Vizentech, the company behind video recording technology using digital converters. Later, Vizentech was sold to the American company Broadcom, and thus the base of Broadcom in Israel was established.
The Morad couple have four children: Anat, Amir, Nirit and Tomer. Following father Ezra, Amir, Nirit and Tomer also decided to study at the Technion.
Amir Mord
Amir Mord, 45, a veteran high-tech entrepreneur, completed three degrees in the Faculty of Electrical Engineering. His PhD topic: multi-core computer architectures and in-memory computing, under the supervision of Prof. Ran Ginosar. According to him, "The path to a doctorate is full of ups and downs and luckily I had an in-depth, challenging and professional supervisor, who with his wisdom and modesty enlightened my path."
During all the years, Amir worked in the entrepreneurial field, because according to him "entrepreneurship is a way of life and an inseparable part of me. It's a long road that requires perseverance, sacrifice and a great deal of creativity - both technical and business." Today he is involved in the establishment of a new venture that will optimize investments in real estate with the help of computational learning and volunteers in various frameworks to advise and assist young entrepreneurs.
He remembers the long period at the Technion as a formative and important period, which gave him essential tools for the world of entrepreneurship. "The Technion is a magnet for anyone interested in a technical-entrepreneurial career. Studies at the Technion provide discipline and theoretical depth, essential tools for understanding problems in depth and finding creative solutions. It is no coincidence that Technion graduates are such an important component of Israeli hi-tech." It is also no coincidence that he started his family with Hagit, a graduate of the Technion Computer Science Faculty, who is also a second generation Technion graduate.

When asked why he didn't settle for a bachelor's and master's degree, he replies with a smile: "The doctorate is a verbal contract with my children - the twins Michael and Daniel (7) and daughter Anna (5). Just as I take them to receive my doctorate, I expect them to invite me to receive my doctorate. Of course, I cannot determine the course of their lives, but it is certainly my duty to set a personal example for them by charting a course in which academic studies are a central part."
Tomer Mord
Tomer Mord, 39, completed a doctorate on the energy-efficient allocation of system resources, under the guidance of Prof. Emeritus Uri Vizer and Prof. Avinoam Kolodani. At a certain point in his doctorate, he slowed down his studies to join his brother Amir in the business world, and later founded a start-up company in the field of digital advertising with partners, which he left only recently in order to devote himself to his doctorate full-time and finish it.
According to him, "The Technion is an excellent place for those who want an entrepreneurial career because the team is a very important element in entrepreneurship and here at the Technion you meet very talented and creative people. The requirements are also very high, in the first degree and certainly in advanced degrees. My supervisors always required me to go deeper and reach significant discoveries, not to rush to publish small achievements, and this is definitely challenging and makes you go far."
In January, Tomer moved with his wife Noa and son Roy to New York and began a post-doctorate, and this without severing his connection to the Technion, since he is doing his post-doctorate at the Technion-Cornell Jacobs Institute. "This is a special program with an emphasis on entrepreneurship, which accepts only about four people a year. This unique program, the Runway Startup Postdoctoral Program, provides participants with an initial funding package worth $150, guidance from experienced mentors, as well as connections to the industry in order to help establish startup companies with deep technology. Cornell Tech, and the Jacobs Institute that operates within it, generate a lot of interest in the city and attract investors and customers who want to be involved, so we get a lot of attention and enjoy quality links to the industry."
The startup that Tomer established as part of the program, together with two partners (one of whom is also a Technion graduate), is called DatArcs and is focused on optimizing servers. "Servers today have hundreds of parameters that can be tuned, and tuning can have a dramatic effect on the performance and energy efficiency of the servers. Since the tuning requires expertise and a lot of work time, and needs to be redone for each application, server farm managers tend not to change the default values, thereby missing opportunities to shorten runtimes and save a lot of energy. The software we develop learns the application that runs each specific client and adjusts in real time the correct parameters on the server, so that it reaches optimal performance with minimal power. This is a software that will be installed in minutes and will show an improvement in a few hours. We cooperate with managers of large server farms who express great interest in our technology, and as mentioned, our location at the Jacobs Institute, and in New York in general, is a huge advantage."
Along with Amir and his brother Tomer, Leonid Yavitz, Amir's partner, also received his doctorate this week. Leonid and Amir met at the Technion as part of their master's degree studies and have been collaborating successfully for more than 20 years. Together the two founded a series of companies. Leonid's PhD topic: Analysis and optimization of parallel computer architectures and memory-based computation, under the guidance of Prof. Ran Ginosar.