News

I got the Weizmann Award for my contributions in Sparse Modeling

The Weizmann Award for the exact sciences is a highly prestegious Israeli prize for excellence in research, given by the Tel-Aviv municipality. I have been warded the 2021 award for my vast work on sparse modeling of data. The formal event was held on December 28th 2021, and this short movie was produced and presented for introducing my work.

My talk in IMVC 2021 is available on YouTube

The 12th Israel Machine Vision Conference (IMVC) was held on October 26th, 2021. My invited talk in this event on novel ways to use image denoisers is available on Youtube.

Two Articles of mine in SIAM News

The March 2021 issue of SIAM News features two articles co-authored by me:

• The first article, with Stacey Levine, is titled "A Deeper Way to Practice Deep Learning", in which we discuss the Imaging Sciences 2020 (IS20) event we have co-chaired. Our article focuses on the major trend we have observed in our community of stepping into deep learning while insisting on reigor, faithful to data models, and beyond.
• The second article, with Yaniv Romano and Peyman Milanfar, titled "A Denoiser Can Do Much More than Just Clean Noise", presents the topic of regularization by denoising (RED). Our joint paper on the subject was the grouds for the early career award that Yaniv got in IS20, and this article summarizes the concept of RED and its prospects.

SIAM Confernece on Imaging Sciences 2020 - A Great Success

The SIAM Conference on Imaging Sciences (IS20) has just ended. This two weeks event that I co-chaired with Stacey Levine, took place on July 6-17 and was all virtual due to the Covid-19 constraints. Nevertheless, this confernece was a great success, with 7 excellent keynote speakers, 3 well-presented minitutorials, 110 minisymposia (each consisting fo 4-5 talks), and hundreds of participants. See you on IS22 in Germany!

See this panel discussion in IMVC 2019 on the future of Deep Learning

IMVC (Israel Machine Vision Conference) 2019 was held on March 18th, featuring lectures from the industry and the academia. I took part in a panel in this event, discussing the impact of deep learning on our field and its future prospects. My main message can be summarised by the following points:

• Deep learning is "dark magic" and much work on the theoretical side is needed to change this.
• Research activities in the industry and the academia are substantially different in their objectives. Papers from the academia should focus much more on explaining and bringing new insights and less so on problem solving for actual applications.
• Image processing and Computer Vision will have a massive come back, once deep learning solutions hit a performance wall.

I have been awarded 2018 IEEE SPS Sustained Impact Paper Award

The Sustained Impact Paper Award of the IEEE Signal Processing Soceity (SPS) honors the authors of a journal article of broad interest that has had sustained impact over many years on a subject related to the Society’s technical scope. This award recipients for 2018 are Michal Aharon, Michael Elad, and Alfred Bruckstein, for their paper: “K-SVD: An Algorithm for Designing Overcomplete Dictionaries for Sparse Representation,” IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing, vol. 54, no. 11, November 2006.

I have been awarded a 2018 IEEE SPS Best Paper Award

Six Best Paper Awards are given in 2018 by the IEEE Signal Processing Society (SPS), honoring the author(s) of a paper of exceptional merit dealing with a subject related to the Society’s technical scope and appearing in one of the Society’s transactions. This year, one of these papers is: Ron Rubinstein, Tomer Peleg, and Michael Elad, "Analysis K-SVD: A Dictionary-Learning Algorithm for the Analysis Sparse Model" IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing, Volume 61, No. 3, February 2013.

I have been awarded the 2018 IEEE SPS Technical Achievement Award

The Claude Shannon – Harry Nyquist Technical Achievement Award of the IEEE Signal Processing Soceity (SPS) is presented this year (2018) to Michael Elad “for contributions to sparsity-based signal processing.” This award honors a person who, over a period of years, has made outstanding technical contributions to theory and/ or practice in technical areas within the scope of the Society, as demonstrated by publications, patents, or recognized impact on this field.

I have been selected (again) as a Clarivate Analytics Highly Cited Researcher

I have been selected (again) as a 2018 Clarivate Analytics (formerly Thompson-Reuters) Highly Cited Researcher. This list contains about 6000 scientists in various disciplines which represent the top 1% in their respective fields. Interestingly, only 18 of this list are from Israel, and I am the only Israeli representing the sub-field "Engineering". More on this list can be found here.

Co-charing SIAM Imaging Sciences 2020 in Toronto

The SIAM-Imaging Sciences event, IS20, is scheduled to be held in Toronto in conjunction with the SIAM annual meeting during the week of July 6-10, 2020. Together with Stacey Levine, I will be chairing this meeting.