AlgoIL #5 - After The Holidays is here!

AlgoIL is back from its summer vacations and we are excited to invite you to our next meeting! This time we have two wonderful talks about gene embedding and zero knowledge proofs.

PLEASE NOTICE: please register with this form in order to attend
https://goo.gl/7TxR6R

Agenda:

17:30 - Gathering and snacks

18:00 - Opening words

18:10 - Ya'ara Arkin, HERE Technologies, Gene2vec

18:50 - Shir Peled, Starkware Industries, Zero Knowledge proofs – toy example and Blockchain applications

19:30 - Networking and mingling

Both talks will be in Hebrew.

Thanks Waze for sponsoring this event!

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Ya'ara Arkin, HERE Technologies, Gene2vec

Abstract:
We all heard of word embedding. But how do you embed genes? And why would you want to do that? In this talk I will explain how embedding of genetic information, combined with locality sensitive hashing, can help genetic researchers speed up their study.

About Ya’ara:
Ya’ara is a data scientist at HERE Mobility. She got there through the same old career path most data scientists make (system mainframe programmer -> art student -> IT specialist -> bioinformatician)

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Shir Peled, Starkware Industries, Zero Knowledge proofs -- toy example and Blockchain applications

Abstract:
Zero-Knowledge (ZK) proofs were introduced in 1985 by Goldwasser, Micali, and Rackoff, and have since been a topic of extensive theoretical research, but very few practical uses.
The rise of blockchains in recent years sparked interest in efficient ZK proofs, because they offer a range of solutions for two of the major problems preventing wider adoption of blockchain technology: privacy and scale.

I will introduce a toy construction of a ZK proof for the Partition Problem (known to be NP-hard).
While being simple and inefficient, the construction exhibits many of the traits and challenges of modern, efficient, ZK-proofs.

About Shir:
After receiving my M.Sc. in CS From HUJI (distributed algorithms), I went on to work in a series of startup companies, developing educational math games for Matific, algorithms for 3D computational geometry for Resonai, and recently - ZK proofs and related tech for Starkware Industries.