Humans, unlike some animals, have a limited ability to regrow missing body parts. However, pioneering research at Technion University could change this.

Article published at www.jpost.com on July 8, 2021.

Technion University researchers are tackling one of the most pressing medical issues: loss of tissue. 

Prof. Shulamit Levenberg and her team in the Biomedical Engineering Department have pioneered research that could make it easier for humans to cultivate tissue, Technion UK stated in a press release on Monday. 

Levenberg said she is currently working on autografting to make this a reality, which is the procedure of moving tissue from one part of the body to another. However, new pioneering research from the Technion might make this process a lot easier.  

This is just one of many new innovations that are coming out of the Technion, as the school has been considered the leading institution for Israeli innovation. 

Long-term implications of Levenberg’s could lead to allowing patients to receive bone and tissue matter in a vat, rather than needing to remove it from another part of their body.

Alan Aziz, CEO of Technion UK, said that the process of humans growing their own body-part replacements in a lab sounds like science fiction, but may soon become a reality.

“It may soon become reality thanks to pioneering research at the Technion – and that’s the tooth, the whole tooth, and nothing but the tooth!” he said.

Just last month, the Technion came out with another groundbreaking innovation that can quickly diagnose tuberculosis. 

Tissue autografting turns pulp fiction into pulp reality

One of the most challenging medical conditions is serious loss of tissue. Unlike certain animals, humans have only a limited capacity for regrowing missing body parts, which is how the science of auto-grafting has been developed. Moving tissue from one part of the body to another is still complicated though – but pioneering research from Israel may be about to make it easier.

Article published at www.labnews.co.uk on July 6, 2021.

Autografting revolves around replacing a missing piece of the body with another. For example, if there has been a significant loss of bone in a hip or knee which means that section of the skeleton can no longer repair itself, a piece of rib could be grafted in instead. The key to success is the supporting infrastructure of soft tissue and blood vessels that enables the bone to heal. This material therefore also needs to be transplanted from one area of the body to the other.

This is the issue that Professor Shulamit Levenberg is taking on. Levenberg works in the Faculty of Biomedical Engineering at the Technion – the Israel Institute of Technology. Along with her colleagues, she is part of a lab that is looking to grow this specialised tissue in vats so that it can be used for auto-grafting. This lab has now successfully built soft tissue with blood vessels from dental pulp, which is the material inside teeth. The stem cells from the dental pulp help blood vessels to form, supporting tissue growth and healing.

This new procedure has been trialled in repairing a bone defect in rats, inserting specially cultivated tissue rather than the traditional method of using existing tissue from another part of the body. This new tissue is deemed to have been more effective in enabling the surgery to heal, whilst also not needing to create another wound in order to extract material to be transplanted, as is usually the case.

In the future, this research could allow patients to receive bespoke bone and tissue matter created in vats, rather than needing to remove it from another part of their body. Where this to be case, it would represent another significant contribution to medical science by the Technion. Since 1912, the academic institution has been at the forefront of spearheading Israel’s scientific endeavours. Israel today is the country with the highest percentage of scientists and engineers – and the majority of them studied at the Technion, home to three of Israel’s five science Nobel Laureates.

European Innovation Council Fund invests 5 million euro ($5.9 million) in NanoVation to speed up development and start EU marketing

Article published at www.timesofisrael.com on July 7, 2021.

The European Innovation Council (EIC) Fund is investing 5 million euro ($5.9 million) in the Israeli medical startup NanoVation, for speeding up the development of a respiratory monitor and to start marketing in the EU.

The investment is part of the EIC’s strategy to identify and support high-impact startups and small companies and assist them in scaling up game-changing technologies, the startup said in a statement.

Last year NanoVation got a 2.5 million euro grant from the European Union’s highly competitive Horizon 2020 EIC Accelerator program.

NanoVation is the first Israeli company to receive both a grant and equity funding from the EIC, the statement said.

The respiratory monitor, called SenseGuard, developed by the Haifa-based company is based on nano-sensor technology developed by Prof. Hossam Haick of the Technion — Israel Institute of Technology.

The device seeks to monitor and manage patients with various respiratory conditions such as chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), a lung disease characterized by long-term breathing problems and poor airflow. The disease is the third leading cause of death globally, according to the World Health Organization.

SenseGuard is a wearable wireless device for continuous and remote monitoring of patients’ breathing, based on information collected by the sensor, which detects various respiratory parameters like respiratory rate, apnea and breath volume, and translates them into clinical information and raises the alarm before the patient reaches a critical point, thus reducing hospital admissions.

It also helps shorten patients’ length of stay in the hospital by providing data to support healthcare professionals’  decisions and actions, and by enabling earlier discharge through monitoring the patient at home. Patients can use the device at home by themselves.

The device has already undergone clinical trials and received the European regulator’s CE mark of approval, showing that the technology is both safe and accurate, the statement said.

“We are grateful and honored by the privilege of being the first Israeli company on such an exclusive list of companies, receiving both a grant and equity financing from the EIC,” said Dr. Gregory Shuster, CEO and co-founder of NanoVation. “This is an additional endorsement of NanoVation and a vote of confidence in our team, in the novel technology we are developing and in the significance of the problem we are addressing. We aim to keep the momentum going and are even considering increasing the latest funding round, to assure effective market penetration and growth prospects.”

NanoVation was founded in 2014 as a spinoff from the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, and Haick is the company’s chief scientific officer.

The company has so far successfully completed two rounds of financing and received grant support from the EU Horizon 2020 program, as well as from the Israel Innovation Authority.

José Fernando Figueiredo, member of the EIC Fund Investment Committee, said that the equity financing “will support NanoVation to successfully scale up its breakthrough technology SenseGuard.”

Established in June 2020, the European Innovation Council Fund is an initiative of the European Commission to make equity investments between 500,000 and 15 million euros in European high impact and deep tech startups and scale-ups.

The EIC Fund provides capital and invests in companies from any sector, across all EU countries and countries associated with Horizon 2020, including Israel.

EIC Fund Invests $5.9M In Israeli Medtech Startup NanoVation

The European Innovation Council (EIC) Fund is investing €5 million ($5.9 million) in the Israeli medical startup NanoVation, a medical device company developing a new respiratory monitoring technology to remotely monitor patients’ breathing and lung function.

Article published at www.nocamels.com on July 7, 2021.

The European Innovation Council (EIC) Fund is investing €5 million ($5.9 million) in the Israeli medical startup NanoVation, a medical device company developing a new respiratory monitoring technology to remotely monitor patients’ breathing and lung function.

The investment is part of the EICs strategy to identity and support high-impact startups and small companies and assist them in scaling up game-changing technologies.

It will also help to accelerate Nanovation’s high accuracy respiratory monitor and launch initial marketing efforts in the EU, a statement from the EIC said.

NanoVation is the first Israeli company to receive both a grant and equity funding from the EIC. The latest investment underscores the EIC’s confidence in NanoVation’s groundbreaking product and its potential to significantly impact the field of respiratory monitoring and remote management of chronic disease, according to the organization.

The Haifa-based company is developing its respiratory monitor, the SenseGuard™, based on its proprietary first-of-a-kind nano-sensor technology.

SenseGuard is a wearable wireless solution for spot-checks or continuous monitoring of patients’ breathing, intended for remote monitoring and managing various respiratory conditions and chronic diseases. It allows to save costs and improve patient’s safety and quality of life by reducing the number of hospital admissions, caused by unnoticed respiratory exacerbations. It also helps to shorten a patient’s length of stay in the hospital by providing data to support healthcare professionals’ timely and efficient decisions and actions, and by enabling earlier discharge through a continuum of monitoring of the patient at home.

The device has already undergone clinical trials and received CE marking. SenseGuard says it can provide clinically useful information about lung health, lung function, and disease propagation, by analyzing the patient’s normal breathing. The measurement is simple and straightforward and does not require any unpleasant and stressful breathing maneuvers from the patient, nor it requires the supervision and guidance of a clinical professional to assure correct execution and reliable results. This allows the patients to use the device at home and execute their daily measurements by themselves. 

NanoVation was founded in 2014 as a spinoff from the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, and is led by Dr. Gregory Shuster, CEO, Nadav Bachar, CTO, and Professor Hossam Haick, the company’s CSO. The company’s mission is to reduce the high medical and economic cost to hospitals of patients with COPD exacerbations and other respiratory conditions and to improve their safety, quality of care and life expectancy. The company has so far successfully completed two rounds of financing and received grant support from the EU Horizon 2020 program and the Israel Innovation Authority.

Last year, NanoVation received a €2.5 million ($2.9 million) grant from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 EIC Accelerator program.

“We are grateful and honored by the privilege of being the first Israeli company on such an exclusive list of companies, receiving both a grant and equity financing from the EIC,” said Shuster. “This is an additional endorsement of NanoVation and a vote of confidence in our team, in the novel technology we are developing, and in the significance of the problem we are addressing.”

José Fernando Figueiredo, a member of the EIC Fund Investment Committee, said: “NanoVation is a great example of how the EIC Fund is targeting the best innovators across Europe and associated countries. This equity financing will support NanoVation to successfully scale up its breakthrough technology SenseGuard, an innovative solution for monitoring of patients with respiratory diseases, including COPD, based on a unique nanosensor-based technology, that aims at improving patients’ quality of life and treatment as well as reducing health care systems costs.”

Cancer treatment is often, fittingly, about the cancer itself. Many treatments try to attack the cancerous cells or at least stimulate a stronger response so that the immune system is better able to fight a tumor.

Article published at www.nocamels.com on July 6, 2021.

ancer treatment is often, fittingly, about the cancer itself. Many treatments try to attack the cancerous cells or at least stimulate a stronger response so that the immune system is better able to fight a tumor.

Israeli company OncoHost takes a different approach. Founded in 2017, OncoHost focuses on the host response to cancer therapy, seeking to personalize and modify care rather than develop new treatments. The company does this by measuring changes in the proteins in a patient’s blood before and after treatment, which helps predict whether or not a patient will respond to the therapy and what proteins are responsible for any resistance.

Dr. Ofer Sharon, CEO of OncoHost, shared the significance of this strategy. “Today, what we see is patients are being treated according to protocols. The protocols are kind of a one-size-fits-all approach,” Sharon tells NoCamels. “A 75-year-old lady with lung cancer will be treated exactly the same as a 45-year-old man because we are treating indications rather than patients.”

“The idea with OncoHost is to provide clinicians with tools that will help them to navigate the disease, help them to navigate or manage the treatment better and potentially improve outcomes,” he explains.

Recently, OncoHost announced that it was launching eight clinical trial sites in the United Kingdom in collaboration with the UK’s National Health Service (NHS). At each of these sites, the company will conduct proteomic (protein-based) analysis of advanced-stage melanoma and non-small cell lung cancer patients (NSCLC) who are receiving immunotherapy. This development came on the heels of an $8 million Series B funding round led by OurCrowd.

The new UK sites join many others already operating elsewhere in the world. OncoHost is working with 14 hospitals in Israel, including almost every major cancer center, along with five sites in the US and one in Germany. Several new sites will open soon in the US, Germany, and Denmark, the company says.

“It’s important because cancer is treated similarly but not identically in all countries. So you want to have as many countries as possible to get a really good understanding and really good coverage of the different approaches to treatment,” Sharon says.

An accidental discovery

Yuval Shaked, now a professor at the Department of Cell Biology and Cancer Science at the Technion’s Rappaport Faculty of Medicine and the Director of the Technion Integrated Cancer Center (TICC), was working in his lab one day while training at the University of Toronto’s Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre when he mistakenly added an anti-cancer drug to a petri dish with cancer cells in it. To his surprise, the cancer cells started to die.

As he tried to deduce what had happened, the idea of the “host response” came to his mind. In one petri dish, the anti-cancer drug had been effective, but when testing it in another, it didn’t work. The genetics of the patient and the tumor mattered, of course; but he realized that the associated question, too often neglected, was how the drug treatment itself interacted with the body’s immune cells in complex ways.

In fact, as years passed and he and others conducted more experiments, Shaked discovered that cancer treatment could even help a tumor grow depending on the host response. Sharon says, “[This] is kind of counterintuitive, right? Our body is working to help the tumor against the treatment.”

He further explains that a tumor is unique because it originates from the patient’s own cells. So for some patients, when the body recognizes the foreign cancer therapy, it may try to support the tumor and fight the treatment. 

With these thoughts in mind, Shaked moved to Israel and continued his research until he determined his idea could help launch a company. He co-founded OncoHost and serves as its Chief Scientific Adviser.

Initially, OncoHost intended to identify new drugs or repurpose existing ones. When Sharon came on as CEO a little more than two years ago, he decided the company should go in a different direction. Rather than focus on drug development, OncoHost would become a diagnostic precision oncology company.

The company’s team today reflects this mission. Comprised of both biologists and mathematicians, they work together to combine tumor biology with machine learning tools. Similarly, the Scientific Advisory Board includes clinicians and scientists, offering the both the patient-centered and technical perspectives.

“It’s a hybrid between worlds: mathematics and biology, biology and medicine,” Sharon tells NoCamels.

OncoHost in practice

The team’s first major product, the one currently being tested in clinical trials, is PROphet. The platform combines proteomic analysis with AI and works specifically for predicting responses to immunotherapy treatments, the type of therapy that strengthens the immune system against cancer. When it’s effective, immunotherapy can work extremely well. But for some patients, immunotherapy is ineffectual, and PROphet tries to delineate who falls in which category.

The platform analyzes proteomic changes in blood samples to monitor the dynamics of biological processes induced by the patient (the host) in response to a given cancer therapy.

“Immunotherapy has achieved excellent results in certain situations for several cancers, allowing patients to achieve longer control of their cancer with maintained quality of life and longer survival,” said Dr. David Farrugia, Consultant Medical Oncologist at NHS, and chief investigator of all eight NHS clinical trial sites with OncoHost. “However, success with immunotherapy is not guaranteed in every patient.”

This study, OncoHost’s ongoing trial dubbed PROPHETIC, “is seeking to identify changes in proteins circulating in the blood which may help doctors to choose the best treatment for each patient. I am excited that Gloucestershire Oncology Centre and its research department have this opportunity to contribute to this growing field of research…” said Dr. Farrugia in a statement.

So far, OncoHost’s ongoing PROPHETIC trials have proven successful, including the protein analysis that helps create proteomic profiles. The results have indicated the platform can predict patient responses to therapy with high accuracy.

“Currently, our accuracy level is outperforming every existing biomarker in the market,” Sharon tells NoCamels. “In a way, my assumption is, and what we see since it’s a machine learning-based platform, is that the more we increase the numbers of patients on the platform, the better the prediction capability of the platform is.”

Continued testing and application will be crucial, then, to PROphet’s success going forward. In the coming months, OncoHost plans to launch its first commercial site in the US. The company is currently recruiting employees and building a lab in preparation. In the meantime, clinical trials using PROphet will continue. 

The question remains, however, what happens with the information PROphet gathers. OncoHost sends blood test results to a patient’s physician, along with a report detailing the patient’s response predictions and possible next steps. 

But sometimes, physicians still may not know exactly how to proceed. While they almost certainly can learn from a patient’s proteomic profile and seem likely to become more attuned to such information as similar technology develops, there are still a lot of unknowns. 

“The numbers of clinical decision points that are required from a clinician and the number of options is huge,” Sharon says. “The only way to decide which is the best option is clinical experience and a guess.”

OncoHost’s goal is to help the doctor and patient make this the most informed possible guess. Its clinical trials are currently focused on melanoma and non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) and will soon expand to other indications including ovarian cancer, head and neck cancers, and urogenital cancers. This will require resistance mapping for different tumor types and will likely bring in new variables. 

OncoHost also has several products in development. One would accelerate the response prediction process before treatment even begins. The other would enable ongoing patient monitoring so a patient knows as soon as possible if their cancer has returned.

Each of these products comes with the same focus — the patient — as part of OncoHost’s unique emphasis on the host response and its efforts to help save lives.

New Collaborations BeKeren Amiel has always wanted to become a doctor; against all odds, the visually impaired young woman is now officially an MD

Among the 241 new MDs who received their Technion diplomas this past June, visually impaired Dr. Keren Amiel stands out for overcoming unusual challenges.

“I’ve always wanted to be a doctor, ever since I was a child,” Dr. Amiel says. “I knew it was going to be a challenge, so initially I was apprehensive, but I decided to try.”

Amiel suffers from congenital nystagmus, a condition she inherited from her father which causes her eyes to “dance” uncontrollably, resulting in significant visual impairment.

Last month, 241 Technion graduates of the Ruth and Bruce Rappaport Faculty of Medicine received their Doctor of Medicine diplomas. Technion President Prof. Uri Sivan spoke at the graduation ceremony; the daughters of Ruth and Bruce, Dr. Vered Drenger-Rappaport and Ms. Irith Rappaport, congratulated the new doctors. For half of them, the ceremony comes two years after their graduation, as no ceremonies were held at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.

For Dr. Amiel, the apprehensions were over when she finally held her MD diploma. Not only that, but over the past year, she completed her internship at the Tel Aviv Sourasky Medical Center, and started residency in child and adolescent psychiatry at Schneider Children’s Medical Center.

Excelling while thinking outside the box

The chief challenge, Amiel says, was being the first, blazing the trail. “The faculty was very supportive and willing to make the necessary adjustments,” she says. “But we had to figure out together what these adjustments were – identify the problems, and figure out how to overcome them. It took some out-of-the-box thinking.”

For example, in anatomy classes, where one has to recognize structures in the human body, she used surgical loupes like surgeons use when performing delicate operations. On one thing she agreed with the faculty from the start: in no way would her education be compromised; there would be no lowering the bar.

“The Technion encourages one to excel,” she says. “It poses a challenge, and an opportunity to learn from the very best. That’s why I wanted to study here.”

Currently, in her work with young patients, Dr. Amiel’s disability offers an unexpected advantage: it helps her to connect with patients. A doctor can be quite intimidating, but a doctor who is also a human being – less so. “I often ask children what they want to be when they grow up,” Dr. Amiel says. “If a child is afraid he or she won’t be able to achieve their dreams, I can encourage them through telling them about the challenges I’ve overcome.”

Paving the way for more people with disabilities 

Commenting on integration of people with disabilities, Dr. Amiel says: “I think visibility is important. The first time my colleagues in the hospital saw me with my nose glued to the computer screen, I suppose it looked weird. But the more common it is, the less weird it becomes, and that opens the way for more people with disabilities.”

While Dr. Amiel is the first visually impaired doctor in Israel, a few have passed this hurdle previously around the world. The first was Jacob Bolotin, who graduated from the Chicago Medical School in 1912. In more recent times, David Hartman earned his medical degree at Temple University in Philadelphia in 1975, followed by Tim Cordes graduating from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2005. The knowledge that she might be the first in Israel, but others around the world have succeeded before her, helped Amiel persevere, and find the way to achieve the goal she has set for herself.

Story by Tatyana Haykin

New Collaborations Between Doral Energy and Technion Israel

Doral Energy-Tech Ventures (Doral-Tech), Doral Energy Group’s innovation and investment arm, will invest in Technion projects in the fields of renewable energy, energy storage, and climate studies. Technion researchers will enjoy access to the Doral Group’s sites in Israel and around the world for the purpose of developing and promoting the technologies.

The Technion – Israel Institute of Technology and Doral-Tech have signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) for strategic cooperation. Under the MOU, both parties will promote research, development, and commercialization on a range of issues, and work towards identifying and realizing joint business opportunities – in response to global challenges in the fields of energy, climate, and the environment.

Doral Energy-Tech Ventures (Doral-Tech), the innovation and investment arm of Doral Energy Group, will invest in various technological projects, including renewable energy, energy storage, agro-solar (integration of agriculture and solar energy), hydrogen production, carbon capture, waste treatment, water, and environmental infrastructure, as well as supporting the Nancy and Stephen Grand Technion Energy Program (GTEP).

As part of the collaboration, Doral-Tech will promote the Technion DRIVE Accelerator – the Technion’s accelerator program, while building a mechanism for joint investments and partnering with startups to join the track. In addition, the company will fund advanced applied research and receive initial exposure to investing in renewable energy technologies from the Technion Technology Transfer Unit (T3). 

The researchers will have access to Doral’s testing facilities in order to advance selected projects and exposure to markets in Israel and abroad. As part of the agreement, Doral will award scholarships to Technion graduate students.

Roee Furman, CEO of Doral Energy-Tech Ventures:  “We are excited and proud of this strategic cooperation with the Technion. This is of commercial and national importance in the development and promotion of the local ecosystem of startups and innovation in the fields of renewable energy, climate, and environmental infrastructure. The Technion has world-renowned researchers, as well as some of the most

advanced laboratory infrastructure in the world. Doral will strengthen academic-industrial ties and provide a platform for researchers to move from laboratory research to Doral’s testing sites and applications in diverse projects in Israel and around the world. This engagement with the Technion will provide Doral with additional and unique opportunities for entrepreneurship, locating and investing in breakthrough technologies, and strengthening its position as a pioneer and leader in its field.”  

Technion Vice President for Research Professor Koby Rubinstein: “The Technion works in many ways to strengthen research ties with the industry, and with the energy sector in particular. We welcome the collaboration with Doral, which will lead to many important research and application achievements.”

Technion Executive Vice President and Director General Professor Boaz Golany: “The agreement with Doral is, in our view, the first step in establishing a broader network of cooperation with energy companies and government bodies engaged in the field. The Technion has established, in large part thanks to generous donors such as the Grand Family, a unique research infrastructure for various energy projects, and now it strives to reach its full potential through collaborations with key players in this sector.

Attitudes towards math are more important than school math attainment for public understanding of quantitative COVID-19 data

Being afraid of math prevents people from engaging with it when they need it – even if they learned it at school, a new study claims.

Since COVID-19 emerged as a global crisis, the news has been dominated by graphs and terms like “R numbers” and “exponential growth,” referring to the rate of spread of the disease. To what extent does the average adult understand the quantitative information appearing in the news? The results of a new study paint a gloomy picture: When asked about “math in the news” items presented to them, even people who had taken advanced mathematics classes in high school did not typically figure everything out, but obtained only an average “grade” of 72/100. But these advanced learners make up a small minority of high school graduates. Those who took only the mandatory level of high school math – as over 50% of high school graduates with official Israeli matriculation certificates tend to do – correctly interpreted much fewer items on average (54/100).

Results were even more troubling for participants who had not passed all the examinations required for the official state certificate. Participants in this group obtained an average “grade” of 44/100 – suggesting they didn’t understand over half of the items in the questionnaire. This latter group represents about 45% of the total cohort of 17-year-olds in Israel in recent years. These findings raise concern about the relevance of school mathematics to the real-life needs of most learners and call attention to the importance of providing all learners with mathematics literacy.

The findings emerged from a new study on mathematical media literacy among a representative sample of 439 Israeli adults. The study was conducted by a team of researchers at the Faculty of Education in Science and Technology at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology during the first wave of COVID-19 cases in Israel (March-April 2020). The team was led by Profs. Einat Heyd-Metzuyanim, Ayelet Baram-Tsabari and Aviv J. Sharon.

The researchers were surprised to find a factor that appears to be even more strongly associated with the participants’ understanding of mathematical information in the news than the level of math they had taken at school: the participants’ self-perceptions as being “good at math” and the extent they find mathematics useful and interesting. This finding suggests that being afraid of math prevents people from engaging with it when they need it – even if they had learned it at school.

“These results seem to show that school mathematics, especially in its high levels, may prepare adults to understand critical information important for their well-being, such as at a time of global pandemic. However, they also indicate that negative attitudes towards math may significantly hinder adults’ engagement with such information,” said the study’s lead author, Prof. Heyd-Metzuyanim. “Our findings should trigger some soul-searching in the mathematics education field,” she added. “After all, the goal of learning mathematics, for most of the public, is to be able to deal with mathematical information in their daily lives. We should therefore make sure that high-school graduates leave school with both the cognitive tools for processing mathematical information around them, and the attitudes and dispositions that would allow them to do so.”

Click here for the paper in Educational Studies in Mathematics

The production of optical components across industries has been drastically simplified by Technion scientists

Technion scientists have dramatically improved and simplified the production of precise optical components by immersing them in liquid. The study, led by Ph.D. student Reut Orange-Kedem and Professor Yoav Shechtman from the Technion Faculty of Biomedical Engineering, was published in the journal Nature Communications.

The scientists developed a novel process of manufacturing these elements – a method that significantly simplifies the production, enabling optical components to be made using a regular 3D printer. This method makes optical components fast and cheap to create, and also allows one to increase the complexity of the elements produced. And all this at no cost in precision.

To achieve this, the scientists immersed the optical component in liquid: a mix of water and glycerol (a cheap substance widely used across industries, including as a food additive). Light moves at different speeds through different substances. For example, it slows down when passing through water or glass. This difference in speed is called the material’s refractive index. The refractive index of the liquid the scientists used is very close to that of their optical component.

Under those conditions, the optical component needs to be 1,000 times bigger in order to perform its function, which is just what the scientists wanted. Being larger, the component is now much easier to produce, and much less sensitive to manufacturing errors. Instead of a lengthy and complex process requiring a cleanroom, it can now be manufactured using a regular 3D printer. The simplicity of the process also allows for the production of more complex components that were near impossible using traditional methods. And the novel components are also tuneable, unlike their traditional predecessors, through manipulation of the glycerol concentration.

Overall, this is an achievement in optics, which puts a better and cheaper tool into the hands of scientists and industries across multiple fields.

Prof. Yoav Shechtman is a member of the Faculty of Biomedical Engineering, the Russell Berrie Nanotechnology Institute (RBNI), and the Lorry I. Lokey Interdisciplinary Center for Life Sciences & Engineering. 
Reut Orange-Kedem is a Ph.D. student under his supervision. This study was supported by the ERC (Horizon 2020) grant, the Zuckerman Foundation, and the Israel Innovation Authority.

Click here for the paper in Nature Communications 

When it comes to Artificial Intelligence, users prefer warmth over competence

Users Prefer the Warmth of an AI System Over Its Competence

A Study by three Technion researchers reveals that AI systems’ competence isn’t enough: for users to choose a system, it needs to have warmth.

Spotify or Apple Music? Waze or Google Maps? Alexa or Siri? Consumers choose between artificial intelligence (AI)-based systems every day. How exactly do they choose which systems to use? Considering the amount of money and efforts spent on AI performance enhancement, one might expect competence and capability to drive users’ choices. Instead, a recent study conducted by researchers from the Faculty of Industrial Engineering and Management at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology shows that the “warmth” of a system plays a pivotal role in predicting consumers’ choice between AI systems.

Research findings from a study featuring more than 1,600 participants, recently published in the Proceedings of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, offer some insight into the psychology of potential users. The researchers, Zohar Gilad, Prof. Ofra Amir, and Prof. Liat Levontin from the Faculty of Industrial Engineering and Management at the Technion, examined the effects of users’ perception of AI systems’ warmth, that is, the systems’ perceived intent (good or ill), and AI systems’ competence, that is, the systems’ perceived ability to act on those intentions, on the choices they made.

Most of the research done to date regarding warmth perceptions of AI-based systems addressed systems with a virtual or physical presence, such as virtual agents and robots. The current study, though, focused on “faceless” AI systems, with little or no social presence, such as recommender systems, search engines, and navigation apps. For these types of AI systems, the researchers defined warmth as the primary beneficiary of the system. For example, a navigation system can prioritize collecting data about new routes (benefitting the system) over presenting the best-known route, or vice versa.

The researchers found that the system’s warmth was important to potential users, even more than its competence, and they favored a highly warm system over a highly competent system. This preference for warmth persisted even when the highly warm system was overtly deficient in its competence. For example, when asked to choose between two AI systems that recommend car insurance plans, most participants favored a system with low-competence (“using an algorithm trained on data from 1,000 car insurance plans”) and high-warmth (“developed to help people like them”), over a system with high-competence (“using a state-of-the-art artificial neural network algorithm trained on data from 1,000,000 car insurance plans”) and low-warmth (“developed to help insurance agents make better offers”). That is, consumers were willing to sacrifice competence for higher warmth.

These findings are similar to what is known of human interactions: warmth considerations are often more important than competence considerations when judging fellow humans. In other words, people use similar basic social rules to evaluate AI systems and people, even when assessing AI systems without overt human characteristics. Based on their findings, the researchers concluded that AI system designers consider and communicate the system’s warmth to its potential users.

Technion has been ranked No. 1 in the field of artificial intelligence in Europe

Over the years, the Technion has established itself as a leading academic institution in AI. It is currently ranked 15th in the world, with 100 faculty members engaged in areas across the AI spectrum.

The Technion’s efforts to advance the field of artificial intelligence have positioned it among the world’s leaders in AI research and development. CSRankings, the leading metrics-based ranking of top computer science institutions around the world, has ranked the Technion #1 in the field of artificial intelligence in Europe (and of course, in Israel), and 15th worldwide. In the subfield of machine learning, the Technion is ranked 11th worldwide. The data used to compile the rankings is from 2016 to 2021.

One of the innovations that is part of the framework of the Technion’s AI prowess is the Machine Learning and Intelligent Systems (MLIS) research center, which aggregates all AI-related activities.

Today, 46 Technion researchers are engaged in core AI research areas, and more than 100 researchers are in AI-related fields: health and medicine, autonomous vehicles, smart cities, industrial robotics, cybersecurity, natural language processing, FinTech, human-machine interaction, and others. Two leading AI researchers co-direct MLIS: Professor Shie Mannor of the Andrew and Erna Viterbi Faculty of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Professor Assaf Schuster of the Henry and Marilyn Taub Faculty of Computer Science.

According to Prof. Mannor, “for years, the Technion has maintained its position as the leading research institute in Israel and Europe in core AI areas. The Technion has a unique ecosystem that includes tens of researchers from various faculties, research centers, and a number of undergraduate and graduate programs in the field.”

“All fields of science, technology, and engineering at the Technion have been upgraded in recent years, applying Technion knowledge in AI fields,” said Prof. Schuster, “Most include components based on information processing and machine learning. Furthermore, the Technion views the dissemination of its acquired knowledge as a mission of national importance for commercial sector. In that regard, the Technion operates in close cooperation with the technology sector in Northern Israel and within its partnership with the prestigious EuroTech Universities Alliance. These partnerships in Israel and worldwide link AI research at the Technion to the vanguard of activity in this field.”

The MLIS center strives toward four main goals: (1) establishing the Technion as a top-5 university in the field of AI worldwide; (2) pooling resources, recruiting researchers, and students from all Technion departments to advance and conduct joint research in the field; (3) connecting Technion researchers with relevant parties in the industry, especially technology companies and other organizations that generate Big Data; (4) Establishing close research collaboration with other prominent research institutes in the AI field in Israel and worldwide.

In May 2021, the Technion entered a long-term collaboration with American software giant PTC, under which the company will transfer its Haifa research campus to the Technion, to advance joint research in AI and manufacturing technology. PTC joins several other organizations that collaborate with the Technion in these fields, among them the technological universities of Lausanne (Switzerland), Eindhoven (Netherlands), Munich (Germany), and the Paris Polytechnique (France) in Europe, as well as Cornell Tech, home of the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute, Waterloo University, and Carnegie Mellon University, which operates the largest center for AI and robotics in the United States.

In a Nano Optics Breakthrough, Technion Researchers Observe Sound-Light Pulses in 2D Materials for the first time

Haifa, Israel June 11, 2021 – Using an ultrafast transmission electron microscope, researchers from the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology have, for the first time, recorded the propagation of combined sound and light waves in atomically thin materials. 

The experiments were performed in the Robert and Ruth Magid Electron Beam Quantum Dynamics Laboratory headed by Professor Ido Kaminer, of the Andrew and Erna Viterbi Faculty of Electrical & Computer Engineering and the Solid State Institute. 

Single-layer materials, alternatively known as 2D materials, are in themselves novel materials, solids consisting of a single layer of atoms. Graphene, the first 2D material discovered, was isolated for the first time in 2004, an achievement that garnered the 2010 Nobel Prize. Now, for the first time, Technion scientists show how pulses of light move inside these materials. Their findings, “Spatiotemporal Imaging of 2D Polariton Wavepacket Dynamics Using Free Electrons,” were published in Science following great interest by many scientists.

Light moves through space at 300,000 km/s. Moving through water or through glass, it slows down by a fraction. But when moving through certain few-layers solids, light slows down almost a thousand-fold. This occurs because the light makes the atoms of these special materials vibrate to create sound waves (also called phonons), and these atomic sound waves create light when they vibrate. Thus, the pulse is actually a tightly bound combination of sound and light, called “phonon-polariton.” Lit up, the material “sings.”

The scientists shone pulses of light along the edge of a 2D material, producing in the material the hybrid sound-light waves. Not only were they able to record these waves, but they also found the pulses can spontaneously speed up and slow down. Surprisingly, the waves even split into two separate pulses, moving at different speeds.

The experiment was conducted using an ultrafast transmission electron microscope (UTEM). Contrary to optical microscopes and scanning electron microscopes, here particles pass through the sample and then are received by a detector. This process allowed the researchers to track the sound-light wave in unprecedented resolution, both in space and in time. The time resolution is 50 femtosecond – 50X10-15 seconds – the number of frames per second is similar to the number of seconds in a million years.

“The hybrid wave moves inside the material, so you cannot observe it using a regular optical microscope,” Kurman explained. “Most measurements of light in 2D materials are based on microscopy techniques that use needle-like objects that scan over the surface point-by-point, but every such needle-contact disturbs the movement of the wave we try to image. In contrast, our new technique can image the motion of light without disturbing it. Our results could not have been achieved using existing methods. So, in addition to our scientific findings, we present a previously unseen measurement technique that will be relevant to many more scientific discoveries.”

This study was born in the height of the COVID-19 epidemic. In the months of lockdown, with the universities closed, Yaniv Kurman, a graduate student in Prof. Kaminer’s lab, sat at home and made the mathematical calculations predicting how light pulses should behave in 2D materials and how they could be measured. Meanwhile, Raphael Dahan, another student in the same lab, realized how to focus infrared pulses into the group’s electron microscope and made the necessary upgrades to accomplish that. Once the lockdown was over, the group was able to prove Kurman’s theory and even reveal additional phenomena that they had not expected. 

While this is a fundamental science study, the scientists expect it to have multiple research and industry applications. “We can use the system to study different physical phenomena that are not otherwise accessible,” said Prof. Kaminer. “We are planning experiments that will measure vortices of light, experiments in Chaos Theory, and simulations of phenomena that occur near black holes. Moreover, our findings may permit the production of atomically thin fiber-optic “cables”, which could be placed within electrical circuits and transmit data without overheating the system – a task that is currently facing considerable challenges due to circuit minimization.”

The team’s work initiates the research of light pulses inside a novel set of materials, broadens the capabilities of electron microscopes, and promotes the possibility of optical communication through atomically thin layers.

“I was thrilled by these findings,” said Professor Harald Giessen, from the University of Stuttgart, who was not a part of this research. “This presents a real breakthrough in ultrafast nano-optics, and represents state of the art and the leading edge of the scientific frontier. The observation in real space and in real-time is beautiful and has, to my knowledge, not been demonstrated before.”

Another prominent scientist not involved with the study, John Joannopoulos from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, added that “The key in this accomplishment is in the clever design and development of an experimental system. This work by Ido Kaminer and his group and colleagues is a critical step forward. It is of great interest both scientifically and technologically, and is of critical importance to the field.”

Prof. Kaminer is also affiliated with the Helen Diller Quantum Center and the Russell Berrie Nanotechnology Institute. The study was spearheaded by Ph.D. students Yaniv Kurman and Raphael Dahan. Other members of the research team were Dr. Kangpeng Wang, Michael Yannai, Yuval Adiv, and Ori Reinhardt. The research was based on an international collaboration with the groups of Prof. James Edgar (Kansas State University), Prof. Mathieu Kociak (Université Paris Sud), and Prof. Frank Koppens (ICFO, The Barcelona Institute of Science and Technology).