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News from the Faculty  Spotlight on autonomous                              Prof. George Karniadakis (right) and Dr. Vikram Singh from
                       cars at the annual                                   the CFD Lab
The section was        Robotraffic competition
  prepared in                                                               New studies and overseas
 collaboration         ROBOTICS FOR YOUTHS A thousand students              guests at the CFD conference
   with the            from Israel and abroad participated in the Nadav
   Technion            Shoham Robotraffic Competition, which took place     RESIDENCY AT CFD The Computational Fluid
 Spokesperson          for the 10th time in March 2019. The program seeks   Dynamics (CFD) Conference, held for the fifth time
                       to provide knowledge and skills related to driving   in July 2019 and presided over by Prof. Steven
                       safety and to reduce the involvement of young        Frankel, presented the research of students and
                       drivers in road accidents. This year’s participants  researchers from the faculty’s CFD lab. The keynote
                       were asked to develop autonomous cars that can       speaker was Brown University’s Prof. George
                       navigate urban environments. Acquiring robotics      Karniadakis, who discussed the revolutionary
                       skills through their activity in the program, the    interaction between computer simulations of
                       participants were tested on cautious driving, road   physical systems and the growing world of machine
                       safety, driving laws, and their design of a robotic  learning and artificial intelligence. The conference
                       solution to common traffic accidents, using the      hosted two researchers who were the first
                       SolidWorks design system.                            participants of the CFD lab’s residency program. The
                       The competition, chaired by Prof. Moshe Shoham,      two, Prof. Jan Nordström of Linköping University,
                       head of the Leumi Robotics Center at the Technion,   Sweden, and Dr. Will Pazner of the Lawrence
                       and Dr. Evgeny Korchnoy, the center’s director, is   Livermore National Laborator in California, gave
                       a collaboration between the center, the World ORT    a series of lectures on high-accuracy numerical
                       network, the “Kadima Mada” organization, the         methods.
                       World Zionist Organization, the Ytek organization,
                       and Eytam Robotics.
                       “Student groups from five schools participated
                       in the first contest, which took place ten years
                       ago. We now have 100 teams in an international
                       competition, and in recent years, regional
                       competitions were also held in Russia and
                       Ukraine,” says Prof. Shoham. “Tens of thousands
                       of students have already taken part in this program
                       and many of them have gone on to study at the
                       Technion—and from there, into the robotics
                       industry.”

                                                                            The academic delegation during the official visit to South Korea

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