News

Computational biology, which analyzes multiple DNA segments using computational tools from the field of big data, allows Dr. Gur Yaari to search for treatments for diseases such as celiac, hepatitis type C, multiple sclerosis, and cancer.

If you, or one of those dear to you, is taken to the hospital with chest pain, what you would want the hospital to have at hand is the novel technology for identifying heart attacks, developed by Dr. Amos Danielli of the Faculty of Engineering.

Researchers from Bar Ilan University have developed a novel chemical sensory method, based on optical fibers that use internally contained light to create external sound waves, and thus receive indirect information on the surrounding environment. This new method can improve the sensory abilities of a wide variety of applications, including industrial processes, and remote detection of chemicals.

Cancer immunotherapy is a general term for clinical methods that seek to boost the body’s innate ability to target and destroy tumors. But while this approach – first explored over a century ago – has become the basis of a number of successful treatments, scientists have never been able to directly observe this success in action. Now, doctoral student Rinat Meir has changed all that, by demonstrating a new method for tracking the activity of cancer-specific T-cells in an animal model. 

Cybersecurity has become the arms race of the 21^st century, in which a “tag team” of hackers try to overcome each new security protocol as it is produced. Maximizing the benefits of the digital revolution – and minimizing its risks – is at the heart of cryptography research being conducted by the Engineering Faculty’s Dr. Carmit Hazay.

This past March, the Emerging Nanoscaled Integrated Circuits & Systems Laboratory (EnICS) – a research entity associated with the BIU Faculty of Engineering – hosted a major conference.  Entitled “New Horizons in the Semiconductor Industry”, the gathering allowed EnICS – along with conference co-sponsor BIRAD, the University’s Technology Transfer company – to throw open its doors.  At the same time, it allowed EnICS’s busy directors to throw something else: a birthday party.

Artificial neural networks seek to mimic – in silico – what the biological brain does naturally: real-time parallel processing of massive data sets. Now, the Engineering Faculty’s Prof. Zeev Zalevsky, together with post doctoral researcher Dr. Eyal Cohen and Zalevsky’s colleague from Hebrew University Dr. Mickey London, has presented the first-ever conceptual design for an in-fiber optical neural network – a portable, photonic processor in which light-based signals are shared within a “feed forward” neural network computational structure.  Not only does this patent-pending system demonstrate high-speed parallel processing with low power consumption, it also achieves something that we take for granted when it happens between our ears: by taking in and processing external data, this optical neural network can learn.