Israel Active

100 students from the Jerusalem College of Technology attended virtually the 5th LevTech Great Minds Hackathon. It was won by a team of four ex-US immigrants who created software for Hebrew predicative text. The software autocorrects and adds vowels to Hebrew words.  (I need this!) (Hebrew site)

Cutting edge Israeli solutions were showcased at Oregon’s annual TechFestNW, held on-line this year. , and promoted their Covid-19 related technologies. In addition, for the first time, 10 Israeli companies participated in the event’s PitchfestNW pitch competition.

Professor Jacob Ziv of Israel’s Technion Institute is the first Israeli to be awarded the Medal of Honor by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). Among his achievements, he co-invented the Wyner-Ziv algorithm and the Lempel-Ziv algorithm used to compress data (ZIP, GIF etc.).

Rice sustains half of humanity, but its cultivation uses 30% - 40% of global freshwater and causes 10% of world methane emissions. Israel’s Netafim has just tested drip-irrigation of 2,470 acres of rice fields in Europe and Asia. For the same yield it used 70% less water and caused zero emissions.

Israel’s Evigence develops visual freshness sensors with “smart” chemicals that change color to alert if a product is nearing its expiry date. In Q1 2021, Russia’s largest food retailer, X5 Retail Group, is to pilot the Green Dot label in several of its 910 Perekrestok supermarket stores.

Israel’s Bionic has developed an application intelligence platform to help companies control complex computer systems. It analyzes applications to deliver a comprehensive systems inventory, architecture and data flows. It then monitors and controls any changes made to production systems.

When a company’s documentation is in a form that is not very user-friendly, Israel’s Zoomin Software will provide customers and potential customers with easy-to-use search and display facilities. So, they can find exactly what they are looking for without knowing where the documentation is held.

Israel’s Mobileye (owned by Intel) has released a one-hour video showing an autonomous car maneuvering its way through the German city of Munich using Mobileye’s camera-based system. It used data crowdsourced from cars, automatically processed into high-definition maps.

Tel Aviv University researchers have developed a process that enables clear, sharp photography of moving objects without motion blur. Computational photography encodes motion information, and a digital image processing algorithm decodes it to restore the image’s sharpness.

Israel’s Vootto has developed an air filtration system that is 99.9% efficient at removing pollutants, including Covid-19, from moving vehicles. Vootto replaces the vehicle’s air every 5 minutes; it has a 4-stage filtration system, plus, it contains an anti-odor material made from herbs and plants.