Previous Talks

In single-particle cryo-electron microscopy (EM) the 3D structure of a molecule needs to be determined from its noisy 2D projection images. Each projection image is taken at an unknown viewing direction. The high level of noise makes it hard to accurately estimate the viewing directions, ultimately affecting the entire process of reconstruction. In the talk, we describe a method for obtaining… Continue Reading Prof. Nir Sharon: Method of moments for 3D single particle ab-initio modeling in Cryo-EM (19/6/19)

Design of nearly frequency-invariant (FI) broadband beamformers for several real-world applications like audio, communication, and sonar systems, is important as such beamformers can recover the signals of interest while reducing some artifacts caused during the beamforming process. Classical approaches of FI beamforming are based on constrained optimization, analytical solutions, and coherent subspace methods. Another concept is based… Continue Reading Yaakov Buchris: Robust and Sparse Design of Differential Microphone Arrays (12/6/19)

In various fields of science and engineering one seeks to solve perceptual grouping problems. Such problems can often be formulated as finding the optimal partition of a graph, where vertices represent points in feature space and edge-weights represent similarity of pairs of points. The usual objective in such partitioning is the minimization of a balanced cut, which represents… Continue Reading Tal Feld: Nonlinear spectral analysis for graph partitioning (29/5/19)

In many practical parameter estimation problems some side information regarding the unknown parameters is available. Types of side information that are commonly encountered in signal processing applications include periodicity, parametric equality and inequality constraints, and sparsity. In this research, we address some fundamental topics in estimation theory in the presence of side information. We exploit… Continue Reading Eyal Nitzan: Estimation Theory with Side Information for Periodic and Constrained Problems (22/5/19)

A fundamental concept in solving inverse problems is the use of regularizers, which yield more physical and less-oscillatory solutions. Total variation (TV) has been widely used as an edge-preserving regularizer. However, objects are often over-regularized by TV, becoming blob-like convex structures of low curvature. This was explained by Andreu et al. by analyzing eigenfunctions of… Continue Reading Shai Biton: Nonlinear Eigenfunctions – The Functional’s Natural Shapes And When To Use Them (23/01/2019)

Protein-RNA binding, mediated through both RNA sequence and structure, plays a vital role in many cellular processes, including neuro-degenerative diseases. Modeling the sequence and structure binding preferences of an RNA-binding protein is a key computational challenge. Accurate models will enable prediction of new interactions and a better understanding of the binding mechanism.   In this… Continue Reading Dr. Yaron Orenstein : Deep learning for protein-RNA interactions (5/12/2018)

Until recent years, the spatial resolution of diffractive imaging devices such as microscopes and ultrasound machines, was considered to be fundamentally limited, as first established by Ernst Karl Abbe almost 150 years ago. The 2014 Nobel prize in chemistry was awarded for methods which proved that although the diffraction limit poses a physical limitation, it… Continue Reading Oren Solomon: Fast Super-resolution Imaging in Optics and Ultrasound: From Sparsity to Deep Learning (21/11/2018)

Single-particle cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM) is an innovative technology for elucidating structures of biological molecules at atomic-scale resolution. In a cryo-EM experiment, tomographic projections of a molecule, taken at unknown viewing directions, are embedded in highly noisy images at unknown locations. The cryo-EM problem is to estimate the 3-D structure of a molecule from these noisy… Continue Reading Dr. Tamir Bendory: Estimation in extreme noise levels with application to cryo-electron microscopy (14/11/2018)