What career does someone choose who grows up in a family of scientists? “Geoff Hinton once said: If your father is a professor, your only choice is what kind of professor you will become,” says Yair Weiss, Professor of Computer Science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (HUJI). Geoffrey Hinton should know, because he is not only a Nobel Prize winner in physics, but also the son of an entomologist. Yair Weiss also knows what he is talking about, because he is not only a friend of Hinton's, but also the son of an economist.
So his path seemed to be mapped out early on, and Weiss's career took an exemplary course: “I first completed my Master’s degree in Applied Mathematics at Tel Aviv University.” He began thinking outside the box early on: “The program was interdisciplinary. One topic that particularly fascinated me was visual illusions. I wanted to explore it further – but from a mathematical perspective, not a psychological one."
Return on a fateful day
An ideal opportunity presented itself far from home, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where Weiss earned his doctorate in brain and cognitive sciences. It was a formative time: “My doctoral advisor, Ted Adelson, was a researcher in both computer vision and human vision. He was interested in how the human visual system works. That's when my curiosity was triggered: I wanted to know not only how computers generate artificial intelligence, but also how human intelligence and perception work.”
With his PhD in hand and after three years as a postdoc at the University of California, Berkeley's Department of Computer Science, Weiss returned home to HUJI, where he has been working ever since. He landed in Jerusalem on that fateful day, September 11, 2001. “I arrived in the morning with jet lag and went to sleep,” he recalls. “When I woke up in the afternoon, someone told me to turn on the TV. The images were unbelievable. My brain couldn't process what my eyes were seeing.”
For much of the world, the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center in New York marked the beginning of a period of fear and uncertainty. For Yair Weiss, too, a new phase of life began at that time – but one characterized by satisfaction and continuity. He was promoted from senior lecturer to associate professor and finally to full professor, and has since enjoyed the benefits of the Israeli research landscape: “We have very good students and doctoral candidates, and as professors we spend less time raising funds than in many other places in the world.”
Fruitful collaborations
In addition, there is a very lively interaction between industry, start-ups, and academia: “We are a relatively small, young society where many people know each other and have friends in industry or at universities. The ecosystem is more closely interlinked.” He proudly reports that his colleague Prof. Amnon Shashua co-founded Mobileye, a company that develops autonomous driving technologies and driver assistance systems. It was sold to Intel for $15 billion in 2017.
Globalization has long since reached Israel. Weiss notices this in his current students: Almost all of them have spent time abroad and speak fluent English. He sees this in his university's collaboration with TUM in the “TUM HUJI AI Hub” and in the fields of Neuroscience, Computer Science, and Law. He himself has already participated in the Global Technology Forum three times to establish contacts between researchers at the TUM Heilbronn Campus and HUJI. He can well imagine future collaborations in the field of “AI for social good.”
Unexpected success
For Weiss, however, AI is both a blessing and a curse: he has no illusions that some students use ChatGPT to solve their exercises. AI even enables cheating in academia: “Some researchers create fake accounts so they can review their own work.”
Perhaps Yair Weiss doubts his scientific idealism in moments like these. But he doesn't want to despair – research offers him too many great experiences for that. Take his publication on Spectral Clustering, for example, which suddenly went through the roof. “The paper was a theoretical discussion of how a particular clustering algorithm works under certain conditions. We discovered a small change in the way people execute the algorithm, which makes it work even better.“ Today, the algorithm is used, for example, to analyze court rulings: ”The work is widely cited because the algorithm is easy to use and can therefore also be applied by people in other disciplines.” This shows once again what makes science so exciting for Weiss: “You never know which of your contributions will be read the most and have the greatest impact. Sometimes they contain important messages that you only recognize in retrospect.”
So his path seemed to be mapped out early on, and Weiss's career took an exemplary course: “I first completed my Master’s degree in Applied Mathematics at Tel Aviv University.” He began thinking outside the box early on: “The program was interdisciplinary. One topic that particularly fascinated me was visual illusions. I wanted to explore it further – but from a mathematical perspective, not a psychological one."
Return on a fateful day
An ideal opportunity presented itself far from home, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where Weiss earned his doctorate in brain and cognitive sciences. It was a formative time: “My doctoral advisor, Ted Adelson, was a researcher in both computer vision and human vision. He was interested in how the human visual system works. That's when my curiosity was triggered: I wanted to know not only how computers generate artificial intelligence, but also how human intelligence and perception work.”
With his PhD in hand and after three years as a postdoc at the University of California, Berkeley's Department of Computer Science, Weiss returned home to HUJI, where he has been working ever since. He landed in Jerusalem on that fateful day, September 11, 2001. “I arrived in the morning with jet lag and went to sleep,” he recalls. “When I woke up in the afternoon, someone told me to turn on the TV. The images were unbelievable. My brain couldn't process what my eyes were seeing.”
For much of the world, the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center in New York marked the beginning of a period of fear and uncertainty. For Yair Weiss, too, a new phase of life began at that time – but one characterized by satisfaction and continuity. He was promoted from senior lecturer to associate professor and finally to full professor, and has since enjoyed the benefits of the Israeli research landscape: “We have very good students and doctoral candidates, and as professors we spend less time raising funds than in many other places in the world.”
Fruitful collaborations
In addition, there is a very lively interaction between industry, start-ups, and academia: “We are a relatively small, young society where many people know each other and have friends in industry or at universities. The ecosystem is more closely interlinked.” He proudly reports that his colleague Prof. Amnon Shashua co-founded Mobileye, a company that develops autonomous driving technologies and driver assistance systems. It was sold to Intel for $15 billion in 2017.
Globalization has long since reached Israel. Weiss notices this in his current students: Almost all of them have spent time abroad and speak fluent English. He sees this in his university's collaboration with TUM in the “TUM HUJI AI Hub” and in the fields of Neuroscience, Computer Science, and Law. He himself has already participated in the Global Technology Forum three times to establish contacts between researchers at the TUM Heilbronn Campus and HUJI. He can well imagine future collaborations in the field of “AI for social good.”
Unexpected success
For Weiss, however, AI is both a blessing and a curse: he has no illusions that some students use ChatGPT to solve their exercises. AI even enables cheating in academia: “Some researchers create fake accounts so they can review their own work.”
Perhaps Yair Weiss doubts his scientific idealism in moments like these. But he doesn't want to despair – research offers him too many great experiences for that. Take his publication on Spectral Clustering, for example, which suddenly went through the roof. “The paper was a theoretical discussion of how a particular clustering algorithm works under certain conditions. We discovered a small change in the way people execute the algorithm, which makes it work even better.“ Today, the algorithm is used, for example, to analyze court rulings: ”The work is widely cited because the algorithm is easy to use and can therefore also be applied by people in other disciplines.” This shows once again what makes science so exciting for Weiss: “You never know which of your contributions will be read the most and have the greatest impact. Sometimes they contain important messages that you only recognize in retrospect.”
