AI and Data Science Symposium Highlights Innovations in Sustainability and Education

The annual meeting of The Center for AI and Data Science at Tel Aviv University (TAD) & Google focused this year on AI for Sustainability and Education.

The event took place on July 15, 2024, at Google's offices and was moderated by Dr. Debby Cohen (Senior Research Scientist at Google) and Dr. Shiri Stempler (Executive Director at TAD).

Prof. Meir Feder (Head of TAD) and Niv Efron (Senior Director of Engineering, Google Research) opened the event and presented the joint program of TAD and Google.

Prof. Tova Milo (Dean, Faculty of Exact Sciences, at TAU) presented the Meduyakot mentoring program to promote women in exact sciences, which is supported by Google.

Dr. Shiri Stempler (Executive Director at TAD) presented the different programs of TAD that are funded with the support of Google:

1. Research grants in the field of AI for sustainability & education
2. Excellence scholarships for students who belong to underrepresented groups in academia in the field of AI
3. A new youth program (BITS of AI) to promote 7-8 graders from the periphery of Israel
4. AI week and additional events of the center.

(Photo: Shani Sadicario)

(Photo: Shani Sadicario)

The event included talks by researchers from TAD who received grants in the joint program:

• Prof. Noa Shenkar (Zoology), Prof. Hadas Mamane (Mechanical Engineering), Offir Inbar (Porter School of the Environment, a PhD student in the group of Prof. Dror Avisar), and Dr. Arnon Hershkovitz (Education).
• Dr. Naama Rozen (from the group of Dr. Ella Daniel, Education) who collaborates with Prof. Gal Elidan (Google) presented their joint work: Do LLMs have consistent values?
   

Jasmin Rubinovitz, Creative Technologist at Google Creative Lab, talked about using AI to provide value to students and teachers. Yochai Blau and Dotan Emanuel, researchers at Google, presented their work in the sustainability field.

Ayelet Benjamini (Engineering Director, Google Research) explained how AI can revolutionize sustainability in a fireside chat.
 

Prof. Hagit Messer Yaron (Engineering, TAU) ended the lecture part with a talk on the challenges in developing environmental technologies based on third-party data - and the case of opportunistic weather sensing.

(Photo: Shani Sadicario)

The event included the workshop: Advanced Prompting in Action, by Lidan Hackmon (Senior Software Engineer, Google). The workshop focused on the power of chain-of-thought reasoning to unlock deeper insights from language models and learn how to harness the full potential of long context.

Thanks to all the organizers and participants from Google and TAD.

View the gallery here >>