Year Two with the Technion

The second year of Decart's collaboration with the Technion has just started, which seems like a good moment to explain what we're doing there and why.

Decart is a frontier AI research lab. A fair share of what we work on doesn't have an answer yet, which also means it hasn't made it into a syllabus. You can finish a good degree without ever meeting those problems. I'd rather students meet them while they're still studying, with us in the room.

As Israel’s leading science and technology university, The Technion is the natural place to do that. It has been producing the people who solve these kinds of problems for longer than most AI labs have existed, and its students are asking hard questions from day one.

Through "Technion-Decart", the Technion-wide excellence program Decart sponsors, we joined students in their first year with guest lectures and workshops focused on generative AI. We brought them to our offices to see the research up close. And the next stage is already in place, a research project that Decart defines, co-supervised by Decart and Technion faculty, which students take on later in the degree. Students in the program also get priority when we hire research interns.

Prof. Eitan Yaakobi, who heads the Technion-Decart Excellence Program at the Technion, sees it from the students’ side. “Through interaction with the Decart team, students gain exposure to the rapidly evolving world of AI, learning about current research challenges and new directions in the field,” he says. “This connection broadens their perspective and enriches their academic experience.”

Year two is about depth. A new group of first-year students is joining the program, and last year’s group continues with us. On the faculty side, we’re building joint research with Technion researchers toward shared publications, and through the “Experts from Industry” framework we’re putting more of Decart’s work in front of faculty and students alike. Technion researchers were working on many of these questions long before they became the industry’s questions.

Recently we hosted a group of 40 UK Friends of the Technion at our offices. They came to hear about the technology. They left with a preview of where some Technion graduates end up a few years later.

In December I’ll be giving a guest lecture at AI Meetups, a series at the Technion’s Faculty of Computer Science that brings academic researchers and industry people into one room to talk about research, technologies, and what’s new in AI. It’s exactly the kind of room this collaboration is meant to create.

Eitan calls the program “a wonderful opportunity to nurture the next generation of AI researchers and innovators.” That’s the goal, and we plan to widen and deepen this work over the coming year.

If you’re a student at the Technion and want to be part of it, get in touch.