The prestigious Technion Award was won this year by Professor Yehuda Pearl and Professor Sir Richard Friend
"The Israeli economy must undergo a change, and turn a high-tech biased economy into a science-biased economy. To that end, we must strengthen the academy, which is the condition for maintaining the strength of Israel's economy, and continue opening the academy to the entire population." This is what Professor Manuel Trachtenberg, chairman of the Higher Education Council's Planning and Budgeting Committee, said last week at the Technion's Harvey Award ceremony. "Only the academy can provide the scientific infrastructure that is the condition for economic prosperity, and the democratization of knowledge is the key to increasing equality and reducing social disparities", he emphasized.
The Harvey Prize was awarded this year to Professors Yehuda Pearl and Sir Richard Friend.
Professor Trachtenberg added that there is justification for the world's admiration for the high level that Israel exhibits in the field of R&D (research and development), and yet it is important to understand that the bulk of the investment is currently channeled to D, that is, to development. "We must invest much more in R, which is research, and in bridging these two aspects, that is, between industry and academia, in programs like 'Magnet.' Apart from that, we must expand the pursuit of innovation beyond the boundaries of high-tech, as is already happening today in the fields of water and energy, which have turned from 'traditional' industries into innovative technological fields."
The Harvey Prize is awarded by the Technion to personalities who have made a significant contribution to humanity, and have made significant achievements in the fields of science and technology, human health and the promotion of peace in the Middle East. Among the recipients of the Harvey Prize are scientists and other personalities from around the world, many of whom later won the Nobel Prize. Technion President Professor Peretz Lavie said that the awarding of the prize is a "celebration of science", and said that in 1972 the Harvey Prize was awarded for the first time, in the presence of Leo Harvey himself, who died a year later, the then President Zalman Shazer and the then Prime Minister Golda Meir. To date, 75 prizes have been awarded, and 13 of the winners later became Nobel Prize winners.
Professor Yehuda Perl from the University of California, Los Angeles, is a leading expert in the field of artificial intelligence, and less than two weeks ago he was announced as the winner of the Turing Award, known as the "Nobel Prize in Computing", for 2011. Perl is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, a member of the AAAI organization and IEEE, and the president of the Daniel Pearl Foundation, named after his journalist son, who was murdered in Pakistan.
Professor Pearl's work laid the foundations for dealing with uncertainty in computer systems, and its applications span a wide spectrum of fields: security, medicine, genetics and language understanding. Alfred Spector, vice president of research and special initiatives at Google, said that "modern applications of artificial intelligence - robotics, smart cars, speech recognition and machine translation - are concerned with uncertainty. Before the innovations developed by Pearl, most artificial intelligence systems relied on Boolean logic - they 'understood' truth and falsehood, and therefore coped well with challenges such as a chess game - but did not successfully cope with 'maybe'."
In the reasons for his winning, the Harvey Prize committee stated that Perl "laid the theoretical foundations for the presentation of knowledge and conclusions in computer science through experimental research. The theories concerning inference under conditions of uncertainty, and especially the approach based on Bayesian networks, have influenced a variety of fields including artificial intelligence, statistics, philosophy, health, economics, social sciences and understanding brain processes. The Harvey Prize in Science and Technology is awarded to Professor Pearl in recognition of the breakthroughs embodied in his research, and their impact on such a wide variety of aspects of our lives."
Professor Sir Richard Friend from the University of Cambridge is the "inventor" of the organic electronics revolution (printed plastic electronics), whose applications include plastic LED devices (OLED screens), advanced photovoltaic cells, the electronic newspaper, and thin and flexible screens.
Professor Friend has more than twenty patents to his name, and his landmark 1990 paper has received approximately 8,000 citations. "Fortunately, some of the Technion's excellent students came to me for a post-doctorate, and exposed me to the quality of the Technion," said Professor Friend, mentioning the names of Professors Gitti Fry and Nir Tesler. "Following them, I came to the Technion, where I have been visiting as a visiting professor for many years."
At the end of the eighties, the OLED - an organic (plastic) diode that emits light - was discovered in the laboratory of Professor Friend. In 1996, he created the first laser device based on this technology, that is, on plastic that is a semi-conductor and emits light. In 1998, the first integrated optoelectronic component was released, which paved the way for the creation of plastic integrated circuits. Professor Friend, one of the pioneers of the field, is a leading player both in the scientific investigation of these materials and in their translation into various applications.
In the Harvey Prize committee's decision to award the prize to Professor Friend, it is stated that "his groundbreaking research led to a deep understanding of the electronic and optical processes in conducting polymers, and led to the realization of a variety of devices, including field-effect transistors, light-emitting diodes, photovoltaic cells and lasers. While proving scientific and technological leadership, Professor Friend made a decisive contribution to the harnessing of science to create new technology, which is partly reflected in the success of two companies he initiated. The Harvey Prize in Science and Technology is awarded to Professor Friend in recognition of his far-reaching contributions to the development of a new family of semiconductors and his impact on our lives."
The Harvey Award was first given in 1972, from the foundation established by Leo M. The late Harvey from Los Angeles, in order to recognize great contributions to the advancement of humanity in the fields of its fruits, prizes worth $75,000 are awarded each year to each winner.
