A view into a mental health brain during Covid-19 times
2021-04-11 19:30 - 20:30 (Australia/Sydney) | Victoria
Our speakers:
Prof. Ian Hickie AM, University of Sydney
Prof. Hickie is Co-Director, Health and Policy at The University of Sydney’s Brain and Mind Centre. He is an NHMRC Senior Principal Research Fellow (2013-2017 and 2018-22), having previously been one of the inaugural NHMRC Australian Fellows (2008-12). He was an inaugural Commissioner on Australia’s National Mental Health Commission (2012-18) overseeing enhanced accountability for mental health reform and suicide prevention. He is an internationally renowned researcher in clinical psychiatry, with particular reference to medical aspects of common mood disorders, depression and bipolar disorder. He is now focused on the development of real-time personalized and measurement-based care systems for use in partnership with young people and their families. These systems promote early intervention, use of new and emerging technologies and suicide prevention. In his role with the National Mental Health Commission, and his independent research, health system and advocacy roles, Prof. Hickie has been at the forefront of the move to have mental health and suicide prevention integrated with other aspects of health care (notably chronic disease and ambulatory care management).
Prof. (Eme) Dorit Ben Shachar, Technion – Israel Institiute of Technology
Prof. Ben-Shachar,PhD is the Head, Laboratory of Psychobiology, Department of Psychiatry, at The Ruth and Bruce Rappaport Faculty of Medicine, Rambam Health Care Campus, Technion – Israel Institute of Technology.Her research interests include, Mitochondrial abnormalities in schizophrenia at the level of RNA and protein modulations, ECT activity, mitochondrial respiration and network dynamics.
Her lab focus in Nano Field: using Nano based technologies as NGS, GWAS as well as Confocal and time lapse microscopy.
Moderator: Dr. Norman Swan, physician and journalist
Producer and presenter of the Health Report, Dr. Swan, is a multi-award winning producer and broadcaster.
Dr Swan’s career has been highlighted by his desire to keep the Australian public informed of health developments as they happen. This allows him to combine medical expertise with investigative reporting, clear analysis and the knowledge to report the latest research in health and medicine.
One of the first medically qualified journalists in Australia, Dr Swan is highly regarded by the medical and health professions.
Event partners

Exploring the Dark Web - Cybercrime and Cyber Security in the Digital Age
2021-05-27 17:30 - 18:30 | ONLINE
Technological breakthroughs have enabled humanity to advance in a pace and manner that only a few decades ago would not have been imagined.
Ironically this brings with it some of the greatest challenges we also face today.
From countries, states and large economies, through to private or public companies, not-for-profit organisations, down to individuals like you, are all exposed to an ever increasing technological threat – Cyber related threats.
Most organisations, irrespective of size gather an enormous amount of information and corporate intellectual property. Often the information they have is very sensitive making it a target for attacks which are generally aimed at gathering information, harming information, or disabling services. Such attacks can damage an organisation’s reputation, endanger virtual and physical assets which result in significant financial costs. Cyber attacks on government and public bodies and infrastructure may disrupt the lives of an entire state and even compromise the wellbeing and security of its citizens.
Our presenters are at the forefront of cyber security intelligence and the insights they share will enable attendees to underestand these problems and offer possible solutions.
Speakers:
Jasmina Zito
Jasmina is a security engineer who specialises in Cyber Threat Intelligence; as well as a freelance illustration artist. She started her career in video game development and Japanese fashion before shifting to cyber security. She now works at Canva in the detection and response team, keeping Canvanauts and Canva users safe from cyber baddies.
Jasmina holds a Bachelor’s Degree, Science in Games Development, Network Security from the University of Technology, Sydney.

Avi Kasztan

Avi brings more than 20 years of entrepreneurial and leadership experience in the technology and network security industry. He is the Founder of Sixgill, a leading Israeli Cyber Intelligence company in the DarkWeb arena
Prior to Sixgill, Avi served at key roles in legendary disruptive companies at their earliest stages such as Checkpoint (creators of first software firewall that uses stateful inspection), and Vocaltec (creators of first VOIP).
Avi holds a BSc. In Computer Engineering and MBA in management of Hi Tech firms, both degrees from the Technion – Israel Institue of Technology.
The event will be moderated by Prof. Michael Blumenstein, Associate Dean (Research Strategy and Management) at University of Technology Sydney
.

The Sky is NOT the Limit
2021-08-11 18:00 - 19:30 | ONLINE
The so called “space race” between the world’s most powerful economies (mostly the U.S., Russia and China) is no longer restricted to governments.
Recently, Billionaire Jeff Bezos spent 10 minutes in space in his ‘New Shepard’ spaceship, a few days earlier Richard Branson was also “touring” space and it is all happening while Elon Musk is working on his “out of this world” project to inhabit Mars – Space X.
Australia and Israel are not staying behind. They are investing substantially to join the “race”.
Next year, Eytan Stibbe will become the second Israeli to enter space. Eytan will conduct several experiments that are expected to advance the study of science and medicine in Israel in various fields. Three of these experiments, from the Technion will be launched to the International Space Station.
Furthermore, a group of three autonomous microsatellites developed by the Technion were launched into space. The trio – part of the Adelis-SAMSON project – will be able to calculate the location of radiating sources on Earth, locating people, airplanes, and marine vessels, thus enabling search-and-rescue missions around the world.
Meanwhile, the Australian Space Agency approves plan to launch test rockets from Whalers Way near Port Lincoln, which follows the Australian Government’s recent announcement of helping local space manufacturers expand their supply chains globally through its AU$1.3 billion Modern Manufacturing Initiative.
Join global space experts as they share insight into the future of space, how it affects everyday life and what role Australia and Israel play in this world.

ASK THE EXPERT - COVID-19
2021-09-19 19:00 - 20:00 | Victoria
Hear from infectious disease expert on Israel’s and Australia’s Covid-19 strategy and challenges.

About this event

With having reached over 1,000 positive cases of COVID-19 a day, many parts of Sydney and NSW have been in strict lockdown for over two months now. In the rest of Australia the figures are even lower, yet most parts are also experiencing continued lockdown. On the flip side, Israel which has a similar population count to NSW, is enjoying much greater freedom despite reaching the highest peak during the entire pandemic of over 10,000 positive cases of Covid-19 a day.
How can that be explained?

Variants, Boosters and Big Data
2022-01-20 19:00 - 20:00 | ONLINE
Researchers are uncovering new insights about COVID-19 seemingly every day — but what does that mean for us, our loved ones, and our communities as we enter the third year of this pandemic?
Join Associate Professor Yair Goldberg and Assistant Professor Dvir Aran, for this fascinating briefing on where things stand with the novel coronavirus, virus variants like Delta and Omicron, and the efficacy of booster shots. Panelists will also share updates from COVID-19 research they are currently conducting, and what it might mean for future detection, treatment, and prevention efforts.
Opening comments and moderation by Dr. Ruth Ratner, GP, Technion Australia’s President.
Yair Goldberg is an associate professor of statistics in the Faculty of Industrial Engineering and Management at the Technion and the Vice Dean for Graduate Studies. His lab uses statistical and machine learning tools to address theoretical questions and real-world problems. Recent papers have focused on both the protection against COVID-19 provided by the Pfizer vaccine and its waning immunity in Israel. In the past two years, he has been part of a research team advising Israel’s Ministry of Health on COVID-19 policymaking. Prof. Goldberg earned his Ph.D. from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He conducted postdoctoral research at the Department of Biostatistics and was a statistical consultant for The Translational and Clinical Science Institute — both at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and then a faculty member at the University of Haifa, before joining the Technion faculty in 2018.
Dvir Aran is an assistant professor at the Faculty of Biology and the Henry and Marilyn Taub Faculty of Computer Science at the Technion. His research field is computational biology, using data science and AI to advance biological and medical research. He develops computational tools and applies them to integrate and analyze big data from multiple sources, including genomic and epigenetic data and electronic medical records. His research aims to advance the understanding of the tumor microenvironment, as well as the immune system, and their relationship with potential treatments. Prof. Aran has gained international recognition for his contributions to the understanding of the tumor microenvironment and other diseases. Since the COVID-19 outbreak began, Prof. Aran has been conducting modeling and analyses of real-world publicly-available COVID-19 data to understand early indications of vaccine effectiveness and waning. He was one of the first to publish research on COVID-19 vaccine effectiveness in Israel.

Women and Girls Changing the World through STEMM
2022-03-03 18:00 - 19:00 | ONLINE
You can view the recording of this webinar here: https://youtu.be/pL8iKgV_YhU

Technion Australia is honored to host two of the world’s leaders in STEMM who changed and keep changing our world.
Join us to hear their personal stories and learn about their recent activities.

Professor Kira Radinsky – https://www.kiraradinsky.com – CEO & CTO at Diagnostic Robotics and a visiting professor at the Technion is an Israeli computer scientist, inventor and entrepreneur, specializing in predictive data mining.
She gained recognition after being selected by the MIT Technology Review to the “35 Innovators Under 35” list. Her work was described in the popular press as predicting the first in 130 years outbreak of cholera in Cuba, based on the pattern identified by mining of 150 years of data from various sources: in poor countries, floods within a year after a drought often follow by a cholera outbreak.
While working on her Ph.D. she co-founded a company, SalesPredict, that was acquired by eBay Israel in 2016, where Kira Radinsky worked as chief scientist and the director of data science during 2016–2019.
Since 2019, Dr. Radinsky is the Chief Executive Officer at Diagnostic Robotics, Tel Aviv, which she co-founded in 2017. She is also a visiting professor at Technion teaching the applications of predictive data mining in medicine. She has co-authored over 10 patents and more than 40 peer-reviewed articles.
Dr. Jenine Beekhuyzen OAM– https://www.jeninebeekhuyzen.com – Visiting Fellow at University of Technology Sydney is the creator of the Tech Girls Are Superheroes campaign.
Dr. Beekhuyzen is a futurist with international recognition for her advocacy and leadership, her research, and her university teaching through which she has impacted tens of thousands of students over the past 18 years. She is committed to creating a workforce capable of building the technology of the future.
Dr Beekhuyzen is the Founder & CEO of the Tech Girls Movement Foundation and the CEO of Adroit Research. She is mobilising a tribe of next-generation leaders who are committed to solving real-world problems with technology. In the past six years at the helm of the Tech Girls Movement Foundation, she has engaged over 10,000 school girls in STEM entrepreneurship across more than 1000 schools. She has published over 65 internationally peer-reviewed articles in journals, conferences and books.

Register now: https://bit.ly/IWDTA

International Pi Day - “Lighting the way with Microscopy”
2022-03-14 19:00 - 20:00 | ONLINE
Watch the full recording here: https://youtu.be/sO2fIGSiAE8

Technion Australia is pleased to invite you to
Celebrate International Pi Day

Special Free Webinar
Monday 14 March 7-8pm Sydney/Melbourne

“Lighting the way with Microscopy”
(A Pi special)
Presented by
Professor Yoav Shechtman and Dr Onit Alalouf

From Technion’s Nano-Bio-Optics Lab

What is Pi Day and why do we celebrate it?
It is a day to celebrate the mathematical constant pi (π) and to eat lots of pie. Pi Day celebrates the mathematical constant π (3.14). It is celebrated because the digits in the date, March 14 or 3/14, are the first three digits of π (3.14)
Professor Yoav Shechtman is Head of Technion’s Nano Bio-Optics Laboratory which has 15 members, researchers and students, at the Technion where he graduated with a BSc and his PhD. He undertook Post-Doctoral research at Stanford University. His research interests include:

Optical super-resolution microscopy – experimental methods and algorithms
Multi-color and three-dimensional nano-tracking
Optical design and analysis through machine learning
Fluorescence microscopy

Dr Onit Alalouf, is the Laboratory Manager and Research Associate in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at the Technion. She obtained her PhD at Technion’s Department of Biotechnology & Food Engineering, MSc at University College, London and BSc at the University of Hertfordshire. Dr Alalouf holds a patent in the diagnostics research area and is the recipient of a number of awards for her research.
To register press this button

Artificial Intelligence (AI) for Remote Patient Monitoring
2022-05-31 19:00 - 20:00 | ONLINE
Special Free Webinar
Tuesday 31.5.2022- 7PM Sydney/Melbourne
Artificial Intelligence for Remote Patient Monitoring
Connecting the dots between Australia and Israel
Following a recent collaboration agreement signed between Technion and the Ingham Institute, come and learn how we can leverage AI to monitor and asses a patient from afar.

Dr. Behar is heading the Artificial Intelligence in Medicine Laboratory (AIMLab.) at the Technion faculty of Biomedical Engineering, Haifa, Israel. The lab focuses on the usage of machine learning in medicine within the context of physiological time series analysis with a specific focus in cardiology, sleep medicine and ophthalmology. Dr. Behar is also the founding director of the Technion-Rambam Center for Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare (CAIH). Dr. Behar is twice winner of the MIT-PhysioNet/Computing in Cardiology competition. He has authored and co-authored over 47 journal papers in leading engineering, physiology and medical journals (h-index: 27) and contributed many open access databases of physiological waveform and open source code (e.g. PhysioZoo, fecgsyn). He is the cofounder of SmartCare Analytics. He serves as editor for the journal Physiological Measurement and has been on the program committee of the Computing in Cardiology international conference since 2013. Joachim holds a PhD in biosignals processing and machine learning from the university of Oxford which was completed under the supervision of Prof. Gari D. Clifford and Dr. Julien Oster. He holds a MEng from l’Ecole Nationale Superieure des Mines de Saint-Etienne in France in Engineering. He completed his postdoctoral study in computational physiology under the guidance of Prof. Yael Yaniv at the Technion where he worked on mathematical modelling of sinoatrial node cells.

Melbourne - Quantum Computing - A laymen discussion with Prof. Moti Segev
2023-02-08 18:30 - 20:00 | South Caulfield Synagogue, 45 Leopold St,, Caulfield South, Victoria, 3162, Australia
Quantum Computing: truth or hype?

Ordinary computers seem strong, powerful, but in fact that are very many problems that even combining all the computing power on Earth would not solve in a reasonable time (say, 50 years). One such example is the “traveling salesman”: how to find the optimal route (the route that would take the shortest time) between 100 destinations. Another example is drug design: we know the equations governing the molecules, but we can’t simulate their action because it is too complicated to compute with even the strongest computers. Yet another example is to break security codes within a reasonable time. But quantum computers in principle can do that. In the past decade, we have witnessed worldwide attempts to build quantum computers. Companies do that because many of them need to optimize designs (Amazon, IBM, Google, and many others). Governments do that because they want to break security codes. Pharmaceutical companies are interested because today drugs are designed through experimental “trial and error”. Is it therefore understandable why huge resources are being invested in constructing quantum computers, and quite a few companies often hold press releases where they declare their quantum computer has demonstrated superiority to classical computers. Is all of that true or just a hype? What is the true status of quantum computing? Will we have a useful quantum computer within the next decade: a computer that can actually do something useful? Finally, are there alternatives that can be used as interim solutions, until one day a useful quantum computer becomes a reality?
