academics-from-israel

"I believe the best academic research touches people’s lives, so I wanted to apply social physics at scale in the real world. This became a huge passion and challenge, which led me to found Endor in 2014."

"I can intuitively understand when a technology has disruptive potential. During my years of research, this helped me focus my energy in the direction most likely to result in breakthroughs."

"The Riverhead Guard, our flag product, protects thousands of sites (including some from fortune-5, and many from fortune-500), keeping them up and running despite massive multi Gbps attacks over long periods of time. Riverhead was acquired by Cisco in 2004, after which I remained a director in Cisco until May of 2009. I have since then returned to a full time professorship position at Tel-Aviv University. 2014 -- 2016 Head of the Blavatnik School of Computer Science Tel-Aviv University."

"We adopted the “love at first sight” approach to hiring. That means we only hire people whose eyes glitter with the realization that what we’re building is amazing."

"My research interests span from distributed systems to tightly coupled multiprocessors. In particular, I am interested in the theoretical study of asynchrony and its effects in systems (both shared memory and message passing based), in concurrent programming (concurrent data structures and transactional memory), and in networking (network security, protecting against denial of service attacks and routing). I often examine synchronization and coordination problems in these areas using tools and models from theoretical computer science and related disciplines."

"The relations between combinatorics and other mathematical and scientific areas have been crucial in the development of the modern theory. Combinatorial concepts and questions appear naturally in many branches of mathematics, and the area has found applications in other disciplines as well."

"After the first interview, it should be clear that our company is the only place where they can imagine working. Once this feeling is mutual, we just have to make the numbers fit."

"The core of most of the fundamental questions in theoretical computer science is combinatorial, as the notion of computation is based on manipulations with finite structures. The investigation of the limits of computation leads to basic combinatorial questions, and much of the design and analysis of efficient algorithms is also combinatorial in nature"

"My parents. They taught me to believe in myself and my ability to achieve anything. They also taught me success that comes at the expense of others is not something to aspire to."

"In my research I tried (and still try) to develop effective techniques by tackling interesting problems. Solving such problems, especially ones with a history, is an important goal, but an even more important goal is the introduction of novel ideas and tools that can lead to further progress."

"My research interests span the range from distributed systems to tightly coupled multiprocessors. In particular, I am interested in the theoretical study of asynchrony and its effects in systems (both shared memory and message passing based)"

"Combinatorics is primarily the mathematics of finite objects, investigating the properties of combinatorial structures. Its areas of study include exact and asymptotic enumeration, graph theory, probabilistic and extremal combinatorics, designs and finite geometries."

"Passion is one of the most important qualities in a leader. Without passion, it’s hard to build an argument that will compel people to follow you. Once you’ve found your passion, identify your vision and communicate it to your team in an inspiring way."

"Israel has traditionally always been a strong center of mathematical research. The Hebrew University has been particularly strong in Set Theory, Logic and Ergodic Theory. As mentioned, I used to come to the university only once a week."

"I am looking for excellent full-time or part-time graduate students to research cutting edge topics in networking and cyber security."

"Although a big part of the research on paraconsistent logics has so far been motivated by the paradoxes in naive set theory, and to developing alternative paraconsistent mathematics, I do not think that paraconsistent mathematics has real interest - at least not as long as we deal with truth in pure mathematics."

"For me the value of paraconsistent logics is as a potential instrument, to be used when there is a need to draw practical conclusions from an inconsistent body of "knowledge"."

"We don’t really understand and agree on what intelligence is."

"In large language models such as ChatGPT, the key to their success was the scale, being able to create very large models that can be trained on huge amounts of data."

"I am honoured and delighted to join Oxford, which has unparalleled expertise in AI and related fields and amazing students."

"It is very expensive to obtain experimental data."

"We don’t yet have anything of comparable scale in biology, and probably the main limitation is the amount of data we have."

"Learning methods that solve real-world problems and at the same time have the trust of domain experts and the broader public."

"What I would like to do is to take a step back and look at the next generation of data sources where the consumer of the data will not be a human but a machine."

"If we say that the data does not necessarily need to be viewed by human scientists, we can come up with completely new experimental data sources."

"The range and diversity of problems in biology is significantly bigger than in language."

"François Chollet posits that intelligence is not about how well a specialized model performs, but how good it is in learning new things, or in other words,"

"I think there is some broadness to the definition of what counts as a foundation model, and more generally, artificial intelligence."

"How well it can generalize across tasks."

"In this sense we are probably still far away from general intelligence and this is one of the reasons why I personally don’t like the term artificial intelligence."

"Biotech and pharma companies try to do it and successfully in many cases."

"One example is Recursion that scaled-up cell-painting technologies, allowing to image hundreds of millions of cells and see what happens to the cells. *When you perturb them either chemically or genetically."

"It will be possible to overcome the lack of experimental data with simulation and it’s an interesting question how to combine simulated data."

"It could be that in some applications we don’t necessarily need the kind of scale we find in ChatGPT."

"I am looking forward to forging new collaborations and synergies within the Department and beyond that would allow us to develop the next generation."

"The prevalent view of the jurisprudents is that sexual intercourse of any kind is not permissible with Zoroastrian or idolatrous women. According to some, a Muslim who has intercourse with such a woman is (from the religious view point) not better than the infidel woman herself. This being so, most fuqaha maintain that women belonging to these groups should embrace Islam before any intercourse can take place. If they refuse, they are used as servants, but sexual intercourse with them is not permitted. This is evidently not an optimal solution, and numerous traditions maintain that women who refuse to embrace Islam willingly should be subjected to coercion."

"Shafi‘i's treatment of the issue is slightly different. Speaking of grown-up Zoroastrian or polytheist women taken into captivity, he maintains that no sexual relations with them are allowed before they embrace Islam without bringing up the question of converting them forcibly. If the female captives are minor but were taken captive with at least one of their parents, the ruling is the same. If, however, the girl was captured without her parents, or one of her parents embraced Islam, she is considered a Muslim and is coerced into embracing it (nahkumu lahā bihukm al-Islām wa nujbiruhā ‘alayhi). Once this happens, sexual relations with her are lawful."

"We have also seen that according to the prevalent view of the traditionists, a female polytheist must be converted to Islam, by coercive measures if necessary, before any sexual relationship with her can take place... Conversion to Islam is not mentioned here as a necessary condition for sexual relations. In the opinion of Mujhid, the captive girl should shave her pubic hair, trim her hair and pare her nails. Then she should perform ablution, wash her clothes, pronounce the shahada and perform a Muslim prayer. But even if she refuses to do these things, her master is still allowed to have sexual relations with her once she has had one menstrual period in his house. And Safiıd b. al-Musayyab simply says that “there is nothing wrong in a man having sexual relations with his Zoroastrian slave-girl”... Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya observes, on the other hand, that: "they (i.e., the Prophet’s companions) did not make sexual relations with Arab captives contingent on their conversion; rather they had sexual relations with them after one menstrual period. God allowed them to do this and did not make it conditional on conversion." Summing up, Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya says that there is not a single tradition which makes sexual relations with female captives contingent on their conversion."

"In both books Pappe in effect tells his readers: "This is what happened." This is strange, because it directly conflicts with a second major element in his historiographical outlook. Pappe is a proud postmodernist. He believes that there is no such thing as historical truth, only a collection of narratives as numerous as the participants in any given event or process; and each narrative, each perspective, is as valid and legitimate, as true, as the next. Moreover, every narrative is inherently political and, consciously or not, serves political ends. Each historian is justified in shaping his narrative to promote particular political purposes. Shlomo Aronson, an Israeli political scientist, years ago confronted Pappe with the ultimate problem regarding historical relativism: if all narratives are equally legitimate and there is no historical truth, then the narrative of Holocaust deniers is as valid as that of Holocaust affirmers. Pappe did not offer a persuasive answer, beyond asserting lamely that there exists a large body of indisputable oral testimony affirming that the Holocaust took place."

"The debate between us is on one level between historians who believe they are purely objective reconstructers of the past, like [Benny] Morris, and those who claim that they are subjective human beings striving to tell their own version of the past, like myself. When we write histories, we built arches over a long period of time and we construct out of the material in front of us a narrative. We believe and hope that this narrative is a loyal reconstruction of what happened — although as was discovered by historiographers Morris had never bothered to read — we can not ride a train back in time to check it. Narratives of this kind, when written by historians involved deeply in the subject matter they write about, such as in the case of Israeli historians who write about the Palestine conflict, is motivated also — and this is not a fault but a blessing — by a deep involvement and a wish to make a point. This point is called ideology or politics. Zionist historians wanted to prove that Zionism was valid, moral and right and Palestinian historians wished to show that they were victimized and wronged.... I had a different point to make: I condemned the uprooting of the Palestinians and the violence inflicted on them, as well as the de—Arabization of Jews who came from Arab countries to Israel, the imposition of military rule on Palestinians in Israel before 1967 and the de—facto Apartheid policies put in place after 1967."

"I am socialist. [...] I think both my political commitment and historian known position developed simultaneously. And one supported the other. Because of my ideology I understood documents I saw in the archives the way I understood them, and because of the documents in the archives I became more convinced in the ideological way I took. A complicated process! Some colleague told me I ruined our cause by admitting my ideological platform. Why? Everybody in Israel and Palestine has an ideological platform. Indeed the struggle is about ideology, not about facts. Who knows what facts are? We try to convince as many people as we can that our interpretation of the facts is the correct one, and we do it because of ideological reasons, not because we are truthseekers."

"[Do you believe that the Jewish people deserve a state?] No, definitely not! The Muslim people don't deserve a state, the Christian people don't deserve a state [...] People of faith deserve that their religion be respected. People, who are part of a national movement, deserve a state. [But] Judaism is not nationalism. Judaism is a religion. Zionism is an ideology that believes that Judaism is a national movement, but most Jews even today don't believe [that...] If it was possible to create a Jewish State not at the expense of the Palestinians and without dispossessing the Palestinians, [...there would be] no problem with the idea of a Jewish state."

"Since external evidence is necessary to corroborate a view derived solely from the Muslim literary account, lack of such corroboration is an important argument against that account's historicity. This approach is therefore more open than the 'traditional' to acceptance of an argumentum e silentio. For if we are ready to discount an uncorroborated report of an event, we must accept that there may be nothing with which to replace it: that the event simply did not happen. That there is no evidence for it outside of the "traditional account" thus becomes positive evidence in support of the hypothesis that it did not happen. A striking example is the lack of evidence, outside the Muslim literature, for the view that the Arabs were Muslim at the time of the Conquest."

"Shameful that a man like that, a former US president, abets propaganda and disseminates things that wound the spirit of Israel’s fighters and its citizens."

"Conservatism begins at home."

"The socialist has always believed that the necessary knowledge is at hand, so there is no need for competition in the marketplace. The economy needs only to be directed by a rational planner who will dictate the transactions that are to proceed for everyone’s benefit. The capitalist, on the other hand, has understood this proposal to be nothing but a conceit, a product of human arrogance and folly—because in reality there is no human being, and no group of human beings, that possesses the necessary powers of reason and the necessary knowledge to correctly dictate how an entire economy should proceed for everyone’s benefit. Instead, the capitalist argues, from a skeptical and empirical point of view, that we should permit many independent economic actors and allow them freely to compete in developing and providing economic products and services. It is understood that because each of these competing business enterprises pursues a different set of aims, and is organized in a manner that is different from the others, some will succeed and some will fail. But those that succeed will do so in ways that no rational planner could have predicted in advance, and their discoveries will then be available for the imitation and refinement of others. In this way, the economy as a whole flourishes from this competition."

"British and American concepts of individual liberty are not universals that can be immediately understood and desired by everyone, as is often claimed. They are themselves the cultural inheritance of certain tribes and nations."

"Enlightenment rationalism, to the extent that its program is taken seriously, is an engine of perpetual revolution, which brings about the progressive destruction of every inherited institution, yet without ever being able to consolidate a stable consensus around any new ones."

"The new world they envision is one in which liberal theories of the rule of law, the market economy, and individual rights—all of which evolved in the domestic context of national states such as Britain, the Netherlands, and America—are regarded as universal truths and considered the appropriate basis for an international regime that will make the independence of the national state unnecessary."

"An order of independent nations would permit diverse forms of self-government, religion, and culture in a “world of experiments” that would benefit all mankind."