The Taub Faculty of Computer Science Events and Talks

Technion CS annual Hackathon - Doing Good will take place on Thursday and Friday, March 30-31, 2023 in the CS Taub Building, and this year will focus on technological developments for hospitalized children with the aim of making their stay in the hospital, their families and the staff that care for them easier. More details will be published soon....
[ Full version ]

Proteins fold from a sequence of amino acids, forming secondary structures which subsequently fold into a three-dimensional structure that enables their function. The amino acid sequence is defined in the genetic sequence as codons, many of which are synonymous, i.e., they code for the same amino acid. The "one sequence, one structure" dogma, established over half a century ago, remains the commonly accepted notion, and implies that synonymous coding is inconsequential to protein...
[ Full version ]

We determine all $m$-ary Boolean functions $f_0,\ldots,f_m$ and $n$-ary Boolean functions $g_0,\ldots,g_n$ satisfying the equation $f_0(g_1(z_{11},\ldots,z_{1m}),\ldots,g_n(z_{n1},\ldots,z_{nm})) = g_0(f_1(z_{11},\ldots,z_{n1}),\ldots,f_m(z_{1m},\ldots,z_{nm})),$ for all Boolean inputs $\{ z_{ij} : i \in [n], j \in [m] \}$. This extends characterizations by Dokow and Holzman[DH09] (who considered the case $g_0 = \cdots = g_n$) and by Chase, Filmus, Minzer, Mossel and Saurabh [CFMM...
[ Full version ]

Recent non-volatile main memory technology (such as Intel’s Optane) gave rise to an abundance of research on building persistent data structures, whose content can be recovered after a system crash. While there has been significant progress in making durable data structures efficient, shortening the length of the recovery phase after a crash (in which data cannot be accessed) has not received much attention. In fact, programmers need to choose exclusively between durable data st...
[ Full version ]

Despite significant advancements in operating system memory management, our understanding of the desired behavior of fundamental techniques introduced decades ago is sometimes incomplete or not well-defined. This can result in correctness issues that might cause the system to crash or be compromised, as well as missed opportunities for optimizations. In this talk, I will present two specific examples of this: (1) the inefficiencies in synchronizing the memory view across different...
[ Full version ]

Atomic concurrent objects, whose operations take place instantaneously, are a powerful technique for designing complex concurrent programs. Since they are not always available, they are typically substituted with software implementations. A prominent condition relating these implementations to their atomic specifications is linearizability, which preserves safety properties of programs using them. However linearizability does not preserve hyper-properties, which include probabilis...
[ Full version ]

Classical Proof-of-Work blockchains like Bitcoin implement a decentralized ledger, where anyone can participate. They aggregate transactions from system users in blocks and decide each block's position in the ledger. They require the block at each position to accrue votes until the probability of a decision change, due to chance or malice, is negligible. To allow consumer usage of such systems, low latency in the order of seconds is necessary. In classical blockchain systems laten...
[ Full version ]

Imaging plays a key role in advancing science, from revealing the internal structure of clouds to providing the first visual evidence of a black hole. While both examples come from different imaging systems, they illustrate what can be achieved with modern computational approaches. Computational imaging combines concepts from physics, machine learning, and signal processing to reveal hidden structures at the smallest and largest of scales. In this talk, I will highlight how peelin...
[ Full version ]

Vehicles possess an extraordinary amount of technological features that are meant to improve the safety and comfort of the driving experience. Those features have become so advanced that many of the driving aspects are now almost completely automated. Most drivers in the world now rely on the computer systems of the vehicle itself in order to perform even the most basic tasks, such as steering and parking. The CAN bus is the main network used for communication between the vario...
[ Full version ]

The diagnosis and treatment planning of many diseases, such as cancer and auto-immune conditions, rely on histological slides. In recent years, digital pathology has become more abundant allowing high-thruput digitization of pathology images and the use of AI to analyze and interpret them. Yet, there are still inherent challenges in harnessing AI for pathology that includes coping with features in multiple size scales, the ability to achieve interpretability of the AI results, and...
[ Full version ]

Amin Vahdat, in a talk that has gone viral, described the five epochs of distributed computing (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Am_itCzkaE0). It’s a great talk, but I disagree with him on one key point. He thinks we are early in the fifth Epoch. I say we entered the fifth Epoch several years ago and we are on the verge of the next Epoch … the sixth Epoch of distributed computing. In this talk I will very briefly outline the five Epochs of distributed computing and then s...
[ Full version ]

The concept of a graph minor is fundamental in topological graph theory. First, I will describe the cornerstones of this theory from the lens of parameterized complexity. Next, I will survey more recent results concerning minor-hitting problems, focusing on three algorithmic paradigms: approximation, kernelization, and parameterized algorithms. Here, an important special case is the Vertex Planarization problem (remove as few vertices as possible to make a given graph planar) – ...
[ Full version ]

You are invited to the CS Taub projects fair for the Winter Semester of 2023, where 30 teams of undergraduate students will present and demonstrate projects in various fields in IoT, Android, Arduino and Networks, developed as part of the final project in the software engineering and communication networks track, most of which were carried out in collaboration with various social associations and organizations, and were intended to make a contribution to...
[ Full version ]

Machine learning (ML) is integrated into our society, it is present in the judicial, health, transportation, and financial systems. As the integration increases, the necessity of ML transparency increases. The fields of explainable and interpretable ML attempt to add transparency to ML: either by adding explanations to a given black-box ML model or by building a model which is interpretable and self-explanatory. Despite the importance of explainability and interpretability, th...
[ Full version ]

The race for performance and the variety of specialized workloads drives the industry to build more parallel, heterogenous, and distributed computing systems. These systems introduce multiple programming challenges. This talk will overview the driving forces, world trends, challenges, and emerging solutions. Specifically, we will overview the oneAPI Initiative and its components and benefits. We will demonstrate SYCL's new programming paradigm and more. Biography: Guy Tamir is a ...
[ Full version ]

Given i.i.d. samples from an unknown distribution over a large domain [N], approximating several basic quantities, including the distribution’s support size, its entropy, and its distance from the uniform distribution, requires (NlogN) samples [Valiant and Valiant, STOC 2011]. Suppose, however, that we can interact with a powerful but untrusted prover, who knows the entire distribution (or a good approximation of it). Can we use such a prover to approximate (or rather, to app...
[ Full version ]

Mobileye representatives will visit CS to present the development of the software and algorithms of Mobileye's autonomous vehicle, the possibilities of employment and life in the company, on Wednesday, January 18, 2023, 12:30 in the Taub lobby....
[ Full version ]

From minute surface vibrations to very fast-occurring events, the world is rich with phenomena humans cannot perceive. Likewise, most computer vision systems are primarily based on 'conventional' cameras, which were designed to mimic the imaging principle of the human eye, and therefore are equally blind to these ubiquitous phenomena. In this talk, I will show that we can capture these hidden phenomena by creatively building novel vision systems composed of common off-the-shelf co...
[ Full version ]

Can preprocessing help reduce computational costs? We study this question in the context of communication complexity, focusing on a simple "simultaneous messages" setting in which computationally unbounded Alice and Bob each send a single message to a computationally bounded Carol. A big part of our work concentrates on the task of computing the inner product function modulo 2 by a polynomial-sized bounded-depth Boolean circuit. Without preprocessing this task was shown to be i...
[ Full version ]

We extend the standard online worst-case model to accommodate past experience which is available to the online player in many practical scenarios. We do this by revealing a random sample of the adversarial input to the online player ahead of time. The online player competes with the expected optimal value on the part of the input that arrives online. Our model bridges between existing online stochastic models (e.g., items are drawn i.i.d. from a distribution) and the online wor...
[ Full version ]

The generalized covering radius (GCR) was recently introduced as a fundamental property of linear codes, shown to characterize a trade-off between storage amount, access complexity, and latency in linear data querying protocols (such as many PIR protocols). In the general case (where the codes are not necessarily linear), the GCR is used in order to formulate a higher-order version of the famous combinatorial football-pool problem. During this talk, we shall discuss the equivalent...
[ Full version ]

Boolean sum and ruling are two well-known construction operators for both parametric surfaces and trivariates. In many cases, the input freeform curves in R^2 or surfaces in R^3 are complex, and as a result, these construction operators might fail to build the parametric geometry so that it has positive Jacobian throughout the domain. In this work, we focus on cases in which those constructors fail to build parametric geometries with a positive Jacobian throughout while the ...
[ Full version ]

Following the immense recent advances in distributed networks, the explosive growth of the Internet, and our increased dependency on these infrastructures, guaranteeing the uninterrupted operation of communication networks has become a major objective in network algorithms. The modern instantiations of distributed networks, such as the Bitcoin network and cloud computing, introduce new security challenges that deserve urgent attention in both theory and practice. In this talk, ...
[ Full version ]

Introducing parallelism to applications is a complex and tedious task. As a result, the field named automatic parallelization emerged. Automatic parallelization refers to the seamless introduction of parallel schemes (such as OpenMP directives) to code. In other words, creating a tool that will mimic the human comprehension process to insert parallelization schemes. In the recent past, the main focus of this field was on creating deterministic tools such as specific functionality ...
[ Full version ]

Private information retrieval (PIR) addresses the question of how to retrieve data items from a database or cloud without disclosing information about the identity of the data items retrieved. The area has received renewed attention in the context of PIR from coded storage. Here, the files are distributed over the servers according to a storage code instead of mere replication. Alongside with the basic principles of PIR, we will review recent capacity results and demonstrate the u...
[ Full version ]

Abstract: We consider the budgeted matroid independent set problem. The input is a ground set, where each element has a cost and a non-negative profit, along with a matroid over the elements and a budget. The goal is to select a subset of elements which maximizes the total profit subject to the matroid and budget constraints. Several well known special cases, where we have, e.g., a uniform matroid and a budget, or no matroid constraint (i.e., the classic knapsack problem), admit a...
[ Full version ]

You are invited to an Open Source workshop on open source and how contributing to open source helps professional development and gaining experience at any stage of your career, in a lecture by Michal Forg, front end developer at Gong company and manager of the largest open source community in Israel, Pull Request, on Tuesday, January 10, 2023 at 18:30 in Taub 337. ...
[ Full version ]

Electronic voting systems are essential for holding virtual elections, and the need for such systems increases due to the COVID-19 pandemic and the social distancing that it mandates. One of the main challenges in e-voting systems is to secure the voting process: namely, to certify that the computed results are consistent with the cast ballots, and that the privacy of the voters is preserved. We propose secure voting protocols for elections that are governed by two central familie...
[ Full version ]

VAYYAR representatives will visit CS to present products and developments and to offer open positions, on Wednesday, January 11, 2023, 12:30, Taub lobby....
[ Full version ]

Neural volumetric representations have become a widely adopted model for radiance fields in 3D scenes. These representations are fully implicit or hybrid function approximators of the instantaneous volumetric radiance in a scene, which are typically learned from multi-view captures of the scene. We investigate the new task of neural volume super-resolution - rendering high-resolution views corresponding to a scene captured at low resolution. To this end, we propose a neural super-...
[ Full version ]

Our modern life is marked by continuous interaction with huge and complex computational environments, a setting which gives rise to numerous theoretical and algorithmic challenges. Algorithms nowadays are often required to optimize objectives that may be theoretically ill-defined, on big data that is complex-structured, while maintaining computational efficiency and provable guarantees such as privacy and robustness. In this talk I will discuss some of my work developing new compu...
[ Full version ]

We consider the online Submodular Welfare problem. In this problem we are given n bidders each equipped with a submodular utility and m items that arrive online. The goal is to assign each item, once it arrives, to a bidder or discard it, while maximizing the sum of utilities. The case of monotone utilities has attracted much attention, however much less is known once utilities are general and not necessarily monotone. When an adversary determines the items' arrival o...
[ Full version ]

Intel will hold a recruitment day and will present employment opportunities, as well as a "Fusion 360" workshop of 3D modeling, printing and Makers experience, on Wednesday, January 4, 2023, starting at 12:30 in the Taub lobby. For the workshop please ...
[ Full version ]

We study close connections between Indistinguishability Obfuscation (IO) and the Minimum Circuit Size Problem (MCSP), and argue that algorithms for one of MCSP or IO would empower the other one. Some of our main results are: If there exists a perfect (imperfect) IO that is computationally-secure against non-uniform polynomial-size circuits, then we obtain fixed-polynomial lower bounds against NP(MA). In addition, computationally-secure IO against non-uniform polynomial-size ...
[ Full version ]

The field of natural language processing (NLP) has been advancing in giant strides over the past several years. The main drivers of this success are: (1) scaling the Transformer deep network architecture to unprecedented sizes and (2) “pretraining” the Transformer over massive amounts of unlabeled text. In this talk, I will describe efforts to provide principled guidance for the above main components and further thrusts in contemporary NLP, aimed to serve as timely constructiv...
[ Full version ]

Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is a powerful, ionizing-radiation-free medical imaging modality. The vast physical and physiological parameters, which MRI is sensitive to, makes it possible to visualize both structure and function in the body. However the prolonged time necessary to capture the information in this large parameter space remains a major limitation of this phenomenal modality, which the field of computational MRI aims to address. By computational MRI we refer to the...
[ Full version ]

Causal inference is fundamental to empirical research in natural and social sciences and is essential for scientific discoveries. Two key challenges for conducting causal inference are (i) acquiring all attributes required for the analysis, and (ii) identifying which attributes should be included in the analysis. Failing to include all necessary attributes may lead to false discoveries and erroneous conclusions. However, in real-world settings, analysts may only have access to par...
[ Full version ]

Yahoo Research will visit CS for a special meeting with graduate students on Tuesday, January 3, 2023 starting at 10:30 at the Grads Club, 2nd floor (at the end of the corridor), Taub Computer Science Building: Program: 10:30 - Gathering 11:00 - Intro - Yahoo Israel Research Center 11:15 - Lecture 1: Leveraging User Email Actions to Improve Ad-Close Prediction - by Yar...
[ Full version ]

You are invited to Microsoft Recruitment day, to a question and answer session with the team about the company's recruitment process, and to a lecture by Noa Berman, a software developer at Microsoft Security, on: Ransomware attacks and how we defend against them at Microsoft Defender for Endpoint, on Monday, January 2, 17:30, at Taub 9. Please pre-register....
[ Full version ]