About Us
Founded in 1944, the American Committee for the Weizmann Institute of Science develops philanthropic support for the Weizmann Institute in Israel, and advances its mission of science for the benefit of humanity.
Aug 14, 2018...
An ultrasound electrocardiogram
Utrasound equipment has shrunk in both size and price in recent years – so much so that it is now standard in hospitals and clinics all over the world. But today’s ultrasound still requires a highly trained expert to acquire the image and interpret the results, and this has prevented its use in certain settings – for example, in urgent care. In a joint venture they call On-Sight, computer scientists at the Weizmann Institute of Science and a cardiologist at the New York University School of Medicine have teamed up to develop an automated system that guides the operator in acquiring the images and then accurately interprets the results for physicians. This venture was recently awarded first place in the third Echovation Challenge of the American Society of Echocardiography.
Mar 13, 2013...
Prof. Shafi Goldwasser
REHOVOT, ISRAEL—March 13, 2013—The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) today announced that Prof. Shafrira (Shafi) Goldwasser of the Weizmann Institute’s Department of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s (MIT’s) Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab, will receive the ACM A.M. Turing Award. She receives the Award together with Prof. Silvio Micali of MIT “for transformative work that laid the complexity-theoretic foundations for the science of cryptography, and in the process pioneered new methods for efficient verification of mathematical proofs in complexity theory.”
https://weizmann-usa.org/news-media/news-releases/less-than-meets-the-eye/
Mar 07, 2016... We do not merely recognize objects – our brain is so good at this task that we can automatically supply the concept of a cup when shown a photo of a curved handle or identify a face from just an ear or nose. Neurobiologists, computer scientists, and robotics engineers are all interested in understanding how such recognition works – in both human and computer vision systems. New research by scientists at the Weizmann Institute of Science and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) suggests that there is an “atomic” unit of recognition – a minimum amount of information an image must contain for recognition to occur. The study’s findings, which recently appeared in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), imply that current models need to be adjusted, and they have implications for the design of computer and robot vision.
Apr 24, 2018...
Kevin Hong for Quanta Magazine
A paper posted online in January takes theoretical computer scientists halfway toward proving one of the biggest conjectures in their field. The new study, when combined with three other recent papers, offers the first tangible progress toward proving the Unique Games Conjecture since it was proposed in 2002 by Subhash Khot, a computer scientist now at New York University.
https://weizmann-usa.org/news-media/in-the-news/could-quantum-computing-be-the-end-of-free-will/
Jun 30, 2018...
Yusuf Ahmad / Reuters
Faster, more powerful computing has the potential to revolutionize fields from drug delivery to freight transportation. But some are also worried that the computers of the future could upend what it means to be human.
Quantum computing capitalizes on the quantum-physics principle that a particle may be in two states at once, as long as it does not leave a record of either state. Unlike traditional computers, which are made of bits restrained to values of zero or one, a quantum computer would allow bits to have both values simultaneously, which would lead to much faster, more powerful processing.
Feb 25, 2019...
Machine learning is being applied to an ever-widening variety of fields, including biology and chemistry, and is becoming increasingly crucial to Israel’s high-tech success.
REHOVOT, Israel — For years, Israeli scientist Tamar Flash has been fascinated with the octopus, and the unusual way the invertebrate’s eight arms propel it effortlessly through the water.
Her interest is no mere hobby. A renowned professor who does research in artificial intelligence at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Flash is using the octopus as a model for methods of diagnosis and treatment of disorders from Parkinson’s disease to autism.
Dec 10, 2019...
A “river” of electrons flowing in a graphene channel. The viscosity generated by the repulsion between electrons (red balls) causes them to flow with a parabolic current density, illustrated here as a white foam wave-front
REHOVOT, ISRAEL—December 10, 2019—We often speak of electrons “flowing” through materials, but in fact, they do not normally move like a liquid. However, such “hydrodynamic” electron flow had long been predicted – and now, Weizmann Institute of Science physicists have managed, with the help of a unique technique, to image electrons flowing similarly to how water moves through a pipe. This is the first time such “liquid electron flow” has been visualized, and it has vital implications for future electronic devices.
https://weizmann-usa.org/news-media/in-the-news/algo-vision-a-glimpse-into-the-future/
Jun 15, 2017...
For humans, seeing really is believing. That’s probably because sight is the most sophisticated of all the senses. So sophisticated, in fact, that 40 per cent of our brain is devoted to processing visual data.
If scientists could find a way to create artificial seeing systems with human-like capabilities, it would represent a major technological breakthrough. Computers would be able to replace human eyes, both in the performance of labour-intensive tasks and in more complex processes such as identifying individual cancer cells among normal tissue. Such systems could even help visually-impaired people to “see.”
Oct 10, 2017...
Shafi Goldwasser, the new director of the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing (Photo by Ronen Goldman).
Turing Award-winning computer scientist Shafi Goldwasser will become the new director of the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing at the University of California, Berkeley, on January 1, 2018.
The Simons Institute is the world’s leading venue for collaborative research in theoretical computer science. Established on July 1, 2012, with a grant of $60 million from the Simons Foundation, the institute is housed in Calvin Lab, where leading researchers in theoretical computer science and related fields, as well as the next generation of young scholars, explore deep unsolved problems about the nature and limits of computation.
Jun 08, 2013...
Israel is now one of the world's tech powerhouses, second only to Silicon Valley as a hub for startups, but it wasn't always this way. Today, in honour of the 84th birthday of Professor Aviezri Fraenkel, we're delighted to share a short film sharing his story of working on the WEIZAC, Israel's first computer.
Short film produced with support from Google as part of our ongoing computing heritage series
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