Rina & Avner Schneur
Rina is a data scientist who has led and participated in top advanced analytics organization. Combining Operations Research scientific methods with her strong modeling and management skills, Rina has devised and guided the development of innovative advanced analytics solution and their application to practical business with focus on impacting business decisions and their bottom line. Most recently Rina served as Director of Business Analytics at Verizon, managing a group of PhD Advanced Analytics professionals who developed solutions, methodologies, models and tools, tackling business problems in network planning, capital allocation, legal, operations, marketing, and others, these significant initiatives resulted in bottom-line impact of $10s Millions per year, as well as qualitative impact on areas such as network reliability and customer satisfaction.
While serving as the President of Informs - the largest organization for Advanced analytics professionals in the world with over 12,000 members from academia, industry and government – Rina has guided the organization through a major transition into an Advanced Analytics leader, and its board to become more strategic oriented. Earlier she was VP Meetings, overseeing all Informs’ conferences. Recently she helped founding Pro-Bono Analytics and has been serving on its committee. She has also been chairing various award and analytics competitions.
Rina Co-founded Emptoris – a sourcing platform company, and developed its first sourcing optimization, which pioneered the use optimization for sourcing organizations.
Earlier in her career Rina managed an Operations Research group at Sabre, focusing on developing algorithms for planning and operational software products for trucking companies.
Rina holds a Ph.D. and a M.S. from MIT (Summa Cum Laude); and graduated from the Technion (Summa Cum Laude) with a B.Sc.
Avner Schneur is the President and CEO of GRM www.grmdocumentmanagement.com . Under Schneur’s leadership, GRM accelerated its growth, expanded its digital offering and extended operations geographically to South America.
Schneur is also the Founder and CEO of Kormeli, LLC www.kormeli.com an investment Group dedicated to funding and advising early-stage technology entrepreneurs and enterprises.
Schneur is the founder of Emptoris Inc, leading Supply and Contract mgt Software Company which was acquired by IBM in 2011. Prior to founding Emptoris Schneur was holding a number of executive positions in Vectis Corporation, a leading software vendor of electronic medical records. Astea International, a leading developer of customer interaction software, Schneur helped lead the company to a successful IPO. Elscint, Inc., a manufacturer of high-end medical imaging systems.
Head of the Center Prof. Shulamit Levenberg, Faculty of Biomedical Engineering, Technion, Haifa
Prof. Levenberg conducts interdisciplinary research on stem cells and tissue engineering. She did her PhD at the Weizmann institute on cell adhesion, and her post doctorate research on tissue engineering with Prof. Robert Langer at MIT. Her research showed that it is possible to create complex tissues including blood vessels in a laboratory and that these engineered tissue-constructs can integrate with the host when implanted.
She is also developing micro bioreactors and nanoliter droplet devices for stem cell growth and manipulations. Levenberg received the Krill Prize for excellence in scientific research by the Wolf Foundation, and was named by Scientific American as a “Research Leader” in Tissue Engineering. Prof. Levenberg is il.