New Keynote Speaker: Naftali Tishby, Hebrew University, Israel

Professor of Computer Science and Computational Neuroscientist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Ruth & Stan Flinkman Family Endowment Fund Chair in Brain Research.

Awards: Israel Defense Prize, Landau Prize in Computer Science, The 2019 IBT Award in Mathematical Neuroscience.

He is one of the leaders in machine learning research and computational neuroscience, and his numerous former students serve in key academic and industrial research positions all over the world. Tishby was the founding chair of the new computer-engineering program, and a director of the Leibnitz Center for Research in Computer Science at Hebrew University. Tishby received his PhD in theoretical physics from Hebrew University in 1985, and was a research staff member at MIT and Bell Labs from 1985 to 1991. Tishby has been a visiting professor at Princeton NECI, the University of Pennsylvania, UCSB, and IBM Research.

He works at the interfaces between computer science, physics, and biology which provide some of the most challenging problems in today’s science and technology. We focus on organizing computational principles that govern information processing in biology, at all levels. To this end, we employ and develop methods that stem from statistical physics, information theory and computational learning theory, to analyze biological data and develop biologically inspired algorithms that can account for the observed performance of biological systems. We hope to find simple yet powerful computational mechanisms that may characterize evolved and adaptive systems, from the molecular level to the whole computational brain and interacting populations.