Israel Active

Israel’s Elbit Systems presented its new Emergency Scenarios Virtual Reality (VR) Trainer for emergency response teams at the Homeland Security and Cyber Conference in Tel Aviv. It also unveiled GroundEye, which provides data and high resolution imagery for crises monitoring.

Professor (Emeritus) David Faiman of Ben Gurion University has been given the David Ben Gurion award for his life’s work researching and promoting renewable energy.  The prize is awarded to those whose “actions fulfill David Ben-Gurion’s vision and follow his legacy.”

Nevada’s WaterStart public-private joint venture and Israel’s National Technological Innovation Authority signed a memorandum of understanding on water-use innovation, to pave the way for Israeli water companies to set up facilities in the arid state of Nevada.

Facebook is holding its first Israeli developer conference, to help creators of Israeli technologies develop their products in line with the social network’s plan to create a connected world.  Over 600 Israeli developers are attending, along with Facebook officials, engineers and product managers.

Coca-Cola Israel and Tel-Aviv based creative agency Gefen Team have designed a Coke bottle that takes a selfie photo of the drinker.  The novel device easily attaches to a half-liter Coke bottle. It then senses the exact moment the bottle reaches a 70-degree tilt, the ideal angle for taking selfies, before snapping a photo.

A research team from Ben Gurion University of the Negev has won a gold medal at the worldwide synthetic biology competition iGEM, held at MIT. The students’ genetic engineering technology (PlastiCure_BGU) breaks down plastic waste and releases energy.

Since January, NatWest, one of the largest banks in the UK, has deployed technology from Israeli cybersecurity firm BioCatch within its private banking arm Coutts and for some of its business customers, successfully preventing online fraud and helping to protect its 14 million customers.

I reported previously on the Raptor smart glasses for cyclists, developed by Elbit unit Everysight.  A test program is being launched for the Augmented Reality (AR) aimed to boost training and enhance performance, fitness and health.

Israel and Germany have set up a three-year, 30 million Euro plan to promote joint nanotechnology initiatives. The program will support joint projects and aims to boost cooperation between companies and research centers in the nanotechnology sector in Israel and Germany.

A recent workshop at Israel’s Technion presented the latest research cooperation between the Technion and Shantou University to help solve China’s severe ecological challenges. It will increase dramatically when the Guangdong Technion Israel Institute of Technology (TGIT) is completed.