Dr. Kira Radinsky, who completed her doctoral studies at the Tehcnion Computer Scienc Department, has entered the MIT Technology Review 2013 list of “young innovators.” Each year, 35 outstanding young innovators under 35 years old make this list. Dr. Radinsky (26), was chosen out of hundreds of candidates, and made the list as an “exceptional innovator for her outstanding work in the field of software.” “Over the years we have chronicled success in the selection of women and men whose inventions and companies they established have made a deep impact on the different trends in human society,” said Jason Pontin, publisher and Editor in Chief. “Previous winners include Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the cofounders of Google; Mark Zuckerberg, the cofounder of Facebook; Jonathan Ive, the chief designer at Apple; and David Karp, founder of Tumblr. We are proud of all our nominees and the range of achievements they have made, and are proud to add Kira to this distinguished list.”

Dr. Radinsky began her studies at the Technion at age 15, joined Technion’s Excellence Program and completed three degrees under the tutelage of Professor Shaul Markovitch from the Faculty of Computer Science. During her studies, she developed a new prediction method that can foresee events with 80% accuracy. This was done by means of scanning literature written over the last 500 years, including all the materials published in the New York Times from 1880 onwards, and finding strong correlations between various events. Among other findings, she discovered that the combination of droughts and storms is a good indicator to a potential cholera outbreak. Today, Kira networks with genocide prevention organizations and medical organizations for the purposes of implementing her research findings and provide potential solutions for suffering populations.

In the course of her studies, Dr. Radinsky went to work at the Microsoft Research Division in the US, headed by Eric Horvitz, and worked there with him and Susan Dumais. Eventually, she went on to found SalesPredict with Yaron Zakai-Or, which has already raised one million dollars. SalesPredict provides predictive analysis to foretell sales expectations, and some of its clients have already effectively grown their sales potential.

Dr. Radinsky’s research earned her awards from numerous organizations, including Google, Yahoo and Facebook. “Kira is a brilliant researcher gifted with unique skills which support her inclusion on this list,” said Professor Shaul Markovitch from the Faculty of Computer Science at Technion. “Kira possesses intense intellect, creativity and curiosity - a rare combination typical of outstanding inventors. In her doctoral study, she tackled a problem that seemed to be unsolvable with the tools currently available – the development of algorithms capable of accurately predicting global events through the use of vast reservoirs of web-based information sources. Her boldness for taking on such a problem and scientific competence that demonstrated her successful solution is what brought her to be included on this list.”

Dr. Kira Radinsky said today in response to the publication: “This is a great honor for me to be nominated to the list of “young innovators” of MIT. I hope that it will encourage more Israeli researchers and scholars to study this field, to facilitate the building of an empirical superpower in Israel.”

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