In collaboration with the Neuron Foundation, IOCB Tech Foundation (member of IOCB Tech Family) gave two talented Israeli students the opportunity to intern at the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics, Charles University, where they could focus on research in the fields of artificial intelligence and cultural heritage protection. The internships were part of Neuron & IOCB Tech Internships in Israel program, which, however, did not send Czech students to Israel this year due to the ongoing conflict and security situation in the country. Instead, Israeli students were invited to the Czech Republic.
During his internship, Kfir Shtokhamer from Hadassah Academic College Jerusalem focused on the issue of so-called adversarial patterns in machine learning, specifically image recognition models. “You can imagine a picture of a cat to which we add a specially created noise, i.e. a hostile pattern. To the human eye, the image will be the same, but the model will see something completely different in it, for example a bus," explains Associate Professor Martin Pilát, Kfir Shtokhamer's mentor.
The goal of Kfir's internship was to increase the resistance of these models against adversarial patterns. He managed this by a few percentage points. His research thus offers the potential to further improve machine learning.
Nitay Yehezkely, also from Hadassah Academic College Jerusalem, devoted his internship to deciphering Hebrew inscriptions on Jewish tombstones in Prague and the surrounding area using artificial intelligence. "Czech Jewish cemeteries are an important database of historical data about the Jewish population. However, due to time, some of the inscriptions became unreadable to the human eye," explains Yehezkely. "The goal of my project was to facilitate research on Jewish monuments and contribute to the preservation of Jewish cultural heritage by enabling the interpretation of illegible inscriptions."
The Neuron & IOCB Tech Internships in Israel program was initiated three years ago by Prof. Martin Fusek from IOCB Tech, and for the past two years, it has been funded by our foundation. "Our goal is to enable students from Czech universities to get to know the Israeli academic environment and how it actively supports the transfer of scientific knowledge and technology into practice. This successful Israeli approach can be a great inspiration for us, this is why supporting closer contacts and gaining experience is so important," says Dr. Barbara Eignerová, chairwoman of the foundations's board.
The program is organized by the Neuron Foundation. However, due to the ongoing conflict and security situation in Israel, it has undergone a significant change this year: "We changed the internship program and for the first time Israeli students got to know the Czech environment and could enrich students in Czechia," says Monika Vondráková, director and co-founder of the Neuron Foundation.