Staying ahead in technology

 

Israel’s Hasso Plattner Institute Research School promotes up-and-coming scientists.

 

Through her office window, Naama Kraus has a view out over all of Haifa – as far as the Mediterranean coast. The 41-year-old Computer Science Ph.D. candidate shares the room on the 12th floor with two other students. All three are hunting for solutions on how to better cope “with the crazy volume of data,” as Kraus puts it. With her research on big data Kraus is one of a good dozen selected Israeli scholarship holders. They’re all members of the Hasso Plattner Institute (HPI) Research School. Since 2010 the HPI, a university institute in Potsdam set up by SAP co-founder Hasso Plattner, has been collaborating with the Technion in Haifa, Israel’s premier technological university.

 

Academic exchange and an inter-disciplinary outlook are the Research School’s two main objectives. “Scientific work is becoming ever more focussed,” explains HPI Director Christoph Meinel. In order to counteract this narrowing of horizons, or so the Potsdam academic comments, the idea is to carefully nurture exchange between experts in neighbouring fields, along with collaboration across national borders. For this reason, twice a year a group of professors and scholarship holders fly to Germany to present their work. And German HPI researchers travel in the opposite direction each June to spend a few days in Haifa. The same applies to the other two Research Schools – in China and South Africa.

Kraus, a mother of three, says, “I am definitely not a typical scholarship holder.” She was on the IBM payroll for a good ten years before resolving to continue her studies. However, doing her Ph.D. would have been difficult without Potsdam’s financial support. For three years the scholarship guarantees her the financial security she needs to dedicate herself completely to her research, apart from the various hours spent teaching, a compulsory element of the stipend. Like all the other HPI scholarship holders, Kraus is one of the outstanding new talents at Technion. There, you do not apply for research funding. “It’s our professors who recommend us.”

 

Kraus’s research concentrates not just on archiving data, but above all on searching for data. Distributed computing is one of the fields she covers, “the distribution of data across several different computer systems,” as she explains. Systems need to be combined with one another such that searches are more effective and both time and space get saved. Selective algorithms provide possible solutions that “are used, for example, in social networks.” Kraus says she can well imagine one day working with Google, Facebook or Yahoo in providing users “with recommendations customized to their needs.”

 

Israel is considered to be at the forefront of scalable computing, which seeks to enhance powerful computer technology. Thus the Israelis complement the research being done in Potsdam. From the outset of the collaboration with Potsdam, Roy Friedman has been one of the mentors for the Israeli scholarship holders. The computer science professor believes the financial support from Germany is a kind of “award for especially strong achievements.” Most of the Israeli scholarship holders have completed several years’ military service and are therefore of an age when they already have families of their own. “Without the financial assistance we would doubtless have far fewer Ph.D. students,” Friedman observes. Moreover, the scholarship holders have access to the latest hardware and software for their research, including technologies that are in part not yet on the market and as a rule customary university programmes would be hard-pushed to finance.

Friedman feels the cultural exchange is immensely fruitful. The Israeli students are more direct when interacting with their professors, “and don’t get browbeaten by hierarchies.” At universities in Israel “students like to question everything,” irrespective of whether it is a fellow student or a professor who is holding the lecture. Such scepticism is meaningful precisely in the computer sciences, he states. And Israelis like to look at what their fellow students are dong and learn from them. “It is definitely effective and instructive to meet people from other cultures,” suggests Israeli scholarship holder Alexander Libov, who has already twice been to Potsdam.

 

The HPI programmes are often also supported by industry, making for close interaction between theory and practice. Representatives of industry always attend the annual symposium on future trends in “service-oriented computing,” a field that includes e-commerce and cloud technologies.

Roy Friedman hopes that the future will see even closer collaboration between research and industry. Many scientists prefer “to hide comfortably behind abstract models,” but, he continues, it is just as important to ascertain to what extent their results are relevant for practical applications. “There is a cultural difference,” Friedman concedes. “Industry requires rapid-fire solutions, while academics think longer term.” The way results are used is also different. “Science likes to communicate them, while industry tends to keep insights gained secret if possible.”