This week the first international Israel Data Science Initiative (IDSI) Conference is taking place. Dozens of leading researchers, most of them from academia – professors and graduates from Israel's leading universities - are attending the conference, held in Ein Gedi
The chairman of the conference's organizing committee is the Director of IDSI, Prof. Paul Feigin from the Technion. "The conference will be attended by dozens of Technion lecturers and their colleagues from research universities in Israel, from public institutions and from companies," he said. “The importance of a physical meeting lies in the need to build the data science community to include core researchers and researchers from satellite disciplines. Such a community will promote mutual and interdisciplinary fertilization and lead to the informed and ethical use of data science for the benefit of society and industry.”
In recent years, there has been a leap in data science and artificial intelligence, and these are increasingly affecting all areas of life, including transportation, medicine, and education. It was against this backdrop that the national initiative was created in 2020. Established by the Council for Higher Education, the initiative promotes activity in these fields through collaborations within academia, between academia and industry, and between entities abroad. The international conference marks the first year of the program's activities both nationally and internationally.
The conference deals with a wide range of topics, including computational learning, natural language processing (NLP), statistical learning, bioinformatics, AI and data science in education, computer vision, data science in biology, responsible AI and social good, and the mathematical basis for data sciences. The conference's keynote lecturers are Prof. Yoav Freund and Prof. Trey Ideker from the University of California, San Diego; Prof. Bin Yu from Berkeley, and Prof. Ming Yuan from Columbia University. Alongside the rich professional program, which includes lectures and poster presentations, there will also be social activities, including gala evenings and excursions in and around the Dead Sea and Ein Gedi.
Link to the conference website
