Isaac Ben-Israel was born in Israel (Tel-Aviv), 1949. He studied Mathematics, Physics and Philosophy at Tel-Aviv University, receiving his Ph.D. in 1988. He joined the Israel Air Force (IAF) after graduating high school (1967) and has served continuously up to his retirement (2002). During his service, Isaac Ben-Israel has held several posts in operations, intelligence and weapon development units of the IAF. He headed the IAF Operations Research Branch, Analysis and Assessment Division of IAF Intelligence, and was the Head of Military R&D in Israel Defence Forces and Ministry of Defence (1991-1997). In January 1998 he was promoted to Major General and appointed as Director of Defence R&D Directorate in IMOD. During his service he received twice the Israeli Defence Award.

After retirement from the IDF Isaac Ben Israel joined the University of Tel-Aviv as a professor and was the head of Curiel Centre for International Studies (2002-2004), the head of the Program for Security Studies (2004-2007), Executive Director of the Interdisciplinary Centre for Technological Analysis & Forecasting at Tel-Aviv University (ICTAF) (2010-2013), Deputy Director of the Hartog School of Government and Policy in Tel-Aviv University (2005-2015) and a member of Jaffe Centre for Strategic Studies (2002-2004). In 2002 he founded and headed the Yuval Ne’eman Workshop for Science, Technology and Security. He was a member of the Board of Trustees of Ariel University Centre (2009-2011), and a member of the advisory council of Neaman Institute for Advanced Studies in Science and Technology at the Technion (2000-2010). In 2002 he founded RAY-TOP (Technology Opportunities) Ltd, consulting governments and industries in technological and strategic issues.

Professor Ben-Israel was a member of the 17th Knesset (Israeli Parliament) between June 2007 and February 2009. During this period he was a member of the Security and Foreign Affairs Committee, the Finance Committee, the Science & Technology committee, the Chairman of the Homeland Security Sub Committee and the Chairman of the Israeli–Indian Parliamentary Friendship Association.

In 2011 he was appointed by the Prime Minister to lead a task force that formulated Israel national cyber policy. Following that he founded the National Cyber Headquarters in the PM Office. In 2014 he was appointed again by the PM to lead another task force which resulted in a government decision (February 2015) to set up a new National Cyber Authority. Isaac Ben Israel was a member of the board of directors of IAI (2000-2002), the board of the Israel Corp. (2004-2007) and the R&D advisory board of TEVA (2003-2007) and Chairman of the Technion Entrepreneurial Incubator (2007). He was the Chairman of Israel National R&D council between 2010-2016.

Professor Ben-Israel has written numerous papers on military and security issues. His book Dialogues on Science and Military Intelligence (1989) won the Itzhak-Sade Award for Military Literature. His book on The Philosophy of Military Intelligence had been published by the Broadcast University (1999) and has been translated into French (2004). His book Science, Technology and Security: From Soldiers in Combat up to Outer Space, was published in 2006. His book on Israel Defence Doctrine was published in 2013.
Isaac is married to Inbal (née Marcus) and they have three sons: Yuval (1981), Roy (1984) and Alon (1988).

As head of the Technological Infrastructure Division, Aviv Zeevi is responsible for generating collaborations between the industry and academia that create advanced technologies and innovative products; these collaborations strengthen the Israeli industry's long-term technological advantage in the fierce competition of international markets. 

Zeevi has vast experience in the field of technological developments, in developing online systems as well as training and simulation systems. In his most recent role he served as the head of the ICT department in the Israeli Research Directorate of the European Research Program. 

Zeevi has a PhD in Information Systems Management from the Tel Aviv University. He holds several additional degrees in Economics, Political Science and Management.

Yoav is the research director of AI2 Israel, and also an associate professor of computer science at Bar Ilan University. His research interests include language understanding technologies with real world applications, combining symbolic and neural representations, uncovering latent information in text, syntactic and semantic processing, and interpretability and foundational understanding of deep learning models for text and sequences. He authored a textbook on deep learning techniques for natural language processing, and was among the IEEE's AI Top 10 to Watch in 2018, and a recipient of the Krill Prize in Science in 2017. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Ben Gurion University, and spent time in Google Research as a post-doc.

As the Vice President and head of the Startup Division, Hanan Brand is responsible for government incentives and grants for hundreds of early-stage entrepreneurs and technology driven startups, using various incentive tools such as the Technological Incubator Program, the Technology Lab Program, the Seed Fund, Tnufa (PoC) Fund and more. Moreover, Hanan is in charge of human capital incentives and grants designed to help with the continued growth of the Israeli high-tech industry. He is also leading the National Climatech program aimed at promoting Technology and Innovation that help mitigate the various challenges posed by the Climate Crisis.  

Hanan's managing experience spans over 15 years in executive roles in the High-tech sector and Venture Capital Investment entities including: General Partner at Cornerstone Venture Partners, Board Member in companies such as DealHub, Axonize (acquired by Schneider), Texel (Acquired by DAZN) and more. Previously he served as a Senior Investment Manager at large VC and PE funds such as JVP and XT Holdings and was the Founder & Chairman of Made in Jerusalem. 

Hanan holds an MBA from the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, and a BA in Finance and Political Science from the Hebrew University. He is also a Steering Committee member at the Azrieli College of Engineering.

In this talk, we discuss several gaping problems of modern LLMs that became particularly salient after the release of ChatGPT. 
How can we make models like ChatGPT truly multilingual? We discuss a set of performance evaluation experiments and the discrepancies between the distribution of languages in the training data and the distribution of languages in terms of their native speakers across the globe. We illustrate how crowdsourcing can amend these challenges using the example of WMT’22 Shared Task on Large-Scale Machine Translation Evaluation for African Languages. 
Another question we have to answer is how LLMs can work in narrow hands-on applications reliably and ethically. With a series of experiments with LLMs and multimodal generative models, we try to illustrate how modern crowdsourcing can facilitate prompt engineering and even assist in fine-tuning a model for a more narrow use case. Finally, we discuss the demand for more skilled and committed data labelers that arises as LLMs get broader adoption.
 

Olga Megorskaya is a CEO at Toloka AI, a global tech company that offers a data-centric environment to support fast and scalable AI development with the help of human insight from around the world (120+ countries, 40+ languages) gathered in a secure and responsible way. 
Previously, Olga developed data production infrastructure and implemented effective use of crowdsourced data labeling for ML-based products in various industries (IT, E-Commerce, Telecom, Ridetech, and others) and tech domains like NLP and CV. 
Olga is a co-author of research papers and tutorials on efficient crowdsourcing and quality control at SIGIR, CVPR, KDD, WSDM, and SIGMOD, and spoke at a number of top-tier scientific conferences including NeurIPS and ICML. 

Prof. Ran Balicer is a physician, scientist and executive, Chief Innovation Officer for Clalit - Israel's largest healthcare organization that covers over half of Israel’s population. He also serves as Founding Director of the Clalit Research Institute, the WHO Collaborating Center on Non-Communicable Diseases Research, Prevention and Control. In these roles, he is responsible for strategy, planning, development and practice implementation of novel data-driven interventions at scale. Prof Balicer is Full Professor and Track Director of the MPH program at the Ben-Gurion University School of Public Health, and heads Israel’s first and only Public Health/Data Sciences combined physician residency program, at Clalit. In these capacities, he has served as mentor for Medical Doctors and advanced studies students over the years. He has authored over 250 scientific publications, books and book chapters. He serves as Chair of the Israeli Society for Quality in Healthcare in the past decade, and as member of multiple national and international high level committees. He serves as an Advisor to Governments and international public organizations such as the World Health Organization (WHO), where he is involved in projects focusing on utilizing data science and AI in achieving effective healthcare provision and care integration. Since 2020, Prof. Balicer serves as Chairman of Israel's National Experts Team on COVID-19 Response, which advises the Israeli Government and Prime Minister. He has led globally recognized groundbreaking real-world studies on COVID-19 risk stratification, mitigation strategies, vaccine effectiveness and safety.

Abstraction is a core tenet of human cognition and communication. Yet, interpreting and grounding abstraction expressed in natural language has not yet been systematically studied in NLP. In this talk, I present our recent work on setting the foundation for a systematic study of processing and grounding abstraction in natural language, and in particular, computational abstraction that hinges on human perception and cognition. First, I draw an explicit link between human language communication and computational thinking skills. Next I present a novel elicitation method we devised via Hexagons, a 2D instruction-following game, and a crowdsourced benchmark we collected based on it, with over 4k naturally-occurring visually-grounded instructions, rich and diverse in their levels of abstraction. Our experiments with these data show that contemporary models and modelling practices are substantially inferior to human performance, and that, crucially, models' performance is inversely correlated with the level of abstraction, with less satisfying performance at the higher abstraction levels. These findings are consistent across models and setups, confirming that NL phenomena which involve abstraction present a challenging domain of investigation, deserving further attention in NLP/AI research in the quest for more human-like human-computer interaction.
 

Reut Tsarfaty is a Professor at Bar-llan University leading the Open Natural Language Processing research lab (The ONLP Lab), and a visiting Professor at Google. Her research focuses on natural language parsing broadly interpreted to cover morphological, syntactic, semantic and pragmatic phenomena, for typologically different languages. She is a leading figure in research on morphologically-rich languages, and she is internationally renowned for her groundbreaking work on Hebrew NLP. Applications Reut has worked on include (but are not limited to) natural language programming, natural language navigation, automated essay scoring, analysis and generation of social media content, and more. Reut's research has received grants and awards as an ERC-Starting-Grant #677352, an ISF grant #1739/26, a research grant from the Ministery of Science and Technology (MOST), and a Google Faculty Research Award.