Steering Committee

David Abraham is heading Bosch Research & Technology Center in Israel, focusing on innovation management and AI research for Bosch Corporate Research unit and for BCAI, respectively, after serving as an Investment Principal with the venture arm of Bosch Group in its Tel Aviv office.

David has more than 20 years of experience in business strategy, communications systems R&D, and strong academic background in research and teaching in electrical engineering.

In his previous positions, David led the Corporate Strategy unit of ECI telecom. Prior to ECI Telecom David held key positions with several acquired startups: he served as the CTO of MEMSCAP Optical Components Business Unit (formerly GalayOr, a $20m exit), and as a Senior Systems Architect with Lucent Technologies (formerly Chromatis Networks, a $4.8b exit).  

David holds a B.Sc. (summa cum laude), M.Sc. and Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the faculty of Electrical Engineering, Technion, Israel Institute of Technology.

Rutie Adar has been heading Samsung’s Strategy and Innovation Center in Israel operating under Samsung Electronics Corporate Strategy Office (CSO). The goal of the CSO is new business creation and growth engines for Samsung Electronics within the existing areas of activity (mobile, consumer electronics and semiconductor) and beyond, focusing on the new data economy. This is accomplished by leveraging acquisitions and investments in growth domains including smart machines and automotive, digital health, internet of things, and artificial intelligence. 

Rutie has been working in the Semiconductors industry during the past 25 years, at both startup and multinational companies. She started her career developing image processing and parallel processing algorithms. In the past 20 years Rutie held various managerial positions in marketing , strategy, planning and business development. She has BSc and MSc in mathematics and computer science from the Hebrew University Jerusalem and MBA from Tel Aviv University. 

Yair Adato is a Computer Vision expert with a passion to bridge technology and business. Currently he is working on a brand-new startup.

Before that, Yair served as the CTO of Trax Retail, where he took part in Trax rapid growth from early stage startup with 20 employees to a Unicorn with over 850 employees. Yair was/is involved in several companies as an advisory board including Sparx, Vicomi, AvoNow(Jul) and Anima.

Yair holds a PhD in Computer Science in the field of computer vision from Ben-Gurion University with collaboration with Harward University. In addition, Yair won the Google European Doctoral Fellowship and worked at Google as part of that fellowship.

Ayelet Akselrod-Ballin is the director of AI at  Zebra Medical Vision where she leads a large excellent team of CV-ML researchers and data scientists. Her work focuses on developing novel technologies for computer vision, machine learning, deep learning, and biomedical image analysis. Ayelet did her Post-doctoral research as a fellow in the Computational Radiology Laboratory at Harvard Medical School, Children’s Hospital (Boston) and she holds a Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics and Computer Science from Weizmann Institute of Science. Prior to joining Zebra Medical Vision,  Ayelet lead the medical imaging research technology at IBM-research and lead the Computer Vision & Algorithms team at MOD.

Rammy is leading NVIDIA Autonomous Machines and Vehicles business development In Israel, focusing on supporting AI startups and local OEMs through AI and Deep Learning education. Rammy has more than 20 years of experience holding executive roles in business development, product management and R&D in the Semiconductor industry as well as leading key engagements with Automotive OEMs and Tier1 globally. Rammy received an MBA from Recanati Business School at Tel Aviv University. He also holds a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from UB University in Connecticut, USA. 

VP Development, Afeka Tel-Aviv Academic College of engineering & CEO, Afeka Yissumim ltd

A seasoned cellular telephony, advanced computing and visualization entrepreneur and manager.

Served as CEO of GraphTech a SW development company for advanced and embedded visualization (acquired by Intel 2011 ).  Prior alon was the  General Manager of the mobile and service providers business unit at RADVISION (acquired by AVAYA), VP Marketing & Business Development at Starhome,

Previously served as Managing Director of a SGI (SiliconGraphics) in Israel and held senior positions with SGI  EMEA.  

Mr. Barnea holds  M.Sc. (Cum Laude) in Industrial Engineering   from Tel Aviv University specializing on Computerized and Robotic Manufacturing Systems.

Alon is a board member of AMCHAM Israel America Chamber of Commerce and past president (2016-2017) of ROTARY Afeka-Avivtek.

Dr. Boaz Cohen manages the Defect Analysis algorithms group at Applied Materials. His group is in charge of developing AI/CV/ML algorithms for 3 of the company's products: the SEM Defect Review tool, the Mask Inspection tool and the communal Automatic Defect Classification system. In addition, his group is also in charge of the company’s DL algorithmic Center-of-Excellence. Prior to joining Applied Materials in 2012, Boaz has managed CV algorithm groups in Nova, Orbotech and Elbit System (ELOP). Boaz has a B.Sc., M.Sc. and Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (1993, 1996, 2000 respectively).

Visiting associate professor, School of Mathematical Sciences, Tel-Aviv University

Head of AI, WIX

Uri is consulting companies that want to add AI capabilities to their services\products. Uri is working with big organizations and helps them to choose and implement the best AI solution for their needs. In addition, Uri has founded the biggest AI community in Israel called “Machine and Deep Learning Israel”. The community has more than 17,000 members who are the leading AI talents in Israel. 

Bella is the founder of Haifa Machine Learning meetup from April 2015. The meetup focuses on deep learning topics and presents state of the art works in the field. Bella is currently a Phd candidate at HUJI and a consultant at AIFortify. Prior to that she worked 7 years at Philips as a scientist developing medical imaging algorithms. 

Ran is the director of General Motors R&D Labs in Israel. Ran founded and led GM’s Smart Sensing & Vision Systems R&D group since 2008. Prior to GM, Ran worked at Comverse and Persay on developing voice biometrics solutions, and at Rafael on developing advanced guidance and control algorithms. Ran holds a Ph.D. in Aeronautics and in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University, CA.

Guy Gilboa is an Associate Professor at the Electrical Engineering Department, Technion – IIT. His research interests are image-processing and computer-vision, focusing on variational methods and nonlinear operator theory. He received his Ph.D. in 2004 (Technion) and  was later a postdoctoral fellow at UCLA. He had various development and research roles within Microsoft and Philips Healthcare. Since 2013 he is a faculty member with the Electrical Engineering Department, Technion –IIT. He is serving at various editorial boards of international journals such as IEEE Signal Processnig Letters and  J. of Mathematical Imaging and Vison.

Elad has over 15 years of experience and leadership in the fields of Algorithm, Software, Electronics and System Engineering of multi-disciplinary systems.

Before joining DiA Imagining Analysis he held several roles including Algorithms Development, Group Management and R&D Director in Orbotech, and Elta.

He holds M.Sc. in Physics from Ben-Gurion University.

Elad is the Vice President of R&D in DiA Imagining Analysis Ltd., a leading provider of AI-powered ultrasound analysis solutions that make ultrasound imaging capture and analysis smarter and accessible to clinicians with all levels of experience.

Leonid Karlinsky leads the CV & DL research team in the Computer Vision and Augmented Reality (CVAR) group @ IBM Research AI. Before joining IBM, he served as a research scientist in Applied Materials, Elbit, and FDNA. He is actively publishing and reviewing at ECCV, ICCV, CVPR and NeurIPS, and is serving as an IMVC steering committee member for the past 3 years. His recent research is in the areas of few-shot learning with specific focus on object detection, metric learning, and example synthesis methods. He received his PhD degree at the Weizmann Institute of Science, supervised by Prof. Shimon Ullman.

Yosi Keller is an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Engineering at the Bar Ilan University. His areas of expertise include signal and image processing, data processing of large data sets, machine learning, signal processing on manifolds, adaptive signal processing, Deep Learning.

Dr. Maron served as the Managing Director of the Research Institute for Nanoscience and Nanotechnology at the Tel Aviv University in Tel Aviv, Israel. Dr. Maron was instrumental in enrolling the University to the first European Network of Excellence on NanoBio, achieving a leading role in the effort to raise the profile of NanoBio research in Europe.

Previously, Dr. Maron was deputy R&D director at TARO Pharmaceuticals where he focused his efforts in R&D renewal, leading to an outstanding pipeline. Dr. Maron also spent three years as Senior Researcher at Merck Sharp and Dohme, working in physiological NMR and analytical methods. After his return to Israel, he worked in various medical diagnostics firms.

Doron Shaked received his BSc from the Ben Gurion University in 1988. MSc. and DSc. from the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology in 1991 and 1995 respectively. From 1995 to 2016 he has been with Hewlett Packard Laboratories Israel in Haifa, where as a principal researcher he led multi-talented research teams on automating printing technologies, image enhancement, automated inspection, and operational data mining. From 2017 to 2018 he was with General Electric's Global Research Center focusing on medical imaging for Ultrasound imagery. Since 2019 he is a Machine Learning R&D manager at GE Healthcare.