Last Wednesday, a welcoming event for new academic staff has been held at the Technion. At the faculty, we are pleased to announce the joining of Dr. Yaniv Romano (on a joint appointment with the Faculty of Computer Science) and of Dr. Alejandro Cohen. Welcome!
Dr. Yaniv Romano
Dr. Yaniv Romano has joined the academic staff at the Technion in January 2021, on a joint appointment with the Faculty of Computer Science and the Faculty of Electrical and Computer Engineering (as part of a computer engineering center shared by both faculties). Yaniv has completed all his degrees at the Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty, at the Technion. He has done his doctorate as part of the direct research track, supervised by Prof. Michael Elad from the Faculty of Computer Science. During the doctorate he dealt with the development of techniques that recover high-quality visual data from corrupted images as well as with the theory of deep learning. At the same time, he developed image super-resolution algorithms at Google labs, which were then widely used in various Google products.
In 2018-2020, Yaniv did his post-doctoral studies at Stanford, at the Department of Statistics. Alongside Prof. Emmanuel Candès, Yaniv developed tools for guaranteeing the reliability of statistical predictions and their applications in machine learning algorithms. These statistical tools have been recently used by The Washington Post, among other things, in order to predict the results of the US Presidential Election. Yaniv’s research in this field is aimed at guaranteeing a safe, ethical use of machine learning algorithms in social applications, medical applications and in numerous other areas.
Yaniv has already won a respectable amount of prizes and scholarships: Among those is the prestigious, international award from the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) and the prize for a young excellent researcher in the field of image processing for 2020. Since his arrival at the Technion, Yaniv has won the chair of new academic staff members, the Prime Minister’s Award for Innovation in Transportation, and the Alon Scholarship from the Council of Higher Education.
Prior to his military service, Yaniv practiced Karate and even instructed junior teams in this field in addition to his high-school studies. Yaniv currently lives in the Krayot with his wife Limor and their two children: Lia and Yonatan.
Dr. Alejandro Cohen
Dr. Alejandro Cohen was born in 1982 in Argentina and made his Aliyah to Israel in 1990.
In August 2021, he has joined the Faculty of Electrical and Computer Engineering.
Alejandro got his B.Sc. from Sami Shamoon (SCE) College of Engineering during his military service as a career soldier. He got his second and third degrees in Communication Systems Engineering from Ben-Gurion University (BGU), and during the years 2019-2021 worked as a post-doctoral student at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) at the department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Professor Muriel Médard’s lab.
Alejandro deals with intradisciplinary research in Data Processing encompassing a wide array of subjects such as, Information Theory, Data Systems Networks as well as Wireless Communication, Signal Processing, Distributed Computing and Cyber Information Security, to name but a few. The main drive underlying Alejandro’s work is the endeavor to improve the way in which we acquire, represent and transmit information.
In addition to his rich academic resumé, Alejando has more than ten years of experience in industrial R&D in the field of Signal Processing and Wireless Communication. Alejandro lives at the Technion with his wife Miriam and their three children: Michal, Alon and Lior, 11, 9 and 4 years old, respectively.