Ben-Gurion University of the Negev is one of Israel’s leading research universities and among the world leaders in many fields. It has around 20,000 students and 4,000 faculty members in the Faculties of Engineering Sciences; Health Sciences; Natural Sciences; the Pinchas Sapir Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences; the Guilford Glazer Faculty of Business and Management; the Joyce and Irving Goldman School of Medicine; the Kreitman School of Advanced Graduate Studies; and the Albert Katz International School for Desert Studies. More than 100,000 alumni play important roles in all areas of research and development, industry, health care, the economy, society, culture and education in Israel. The University has three main campuses: The Marcus Family Campus in Beer-Sheva; the research campus at Sde Boker and the Eilat Campus, and is home to national and multi-disciplinary research institutes: the National Institute for Biotechnology in the Negev; the National Institute of Solar Energy; the Ilse Katz Institute for Nanoscale Science and Technology; the Jacob Blaustein Institutes for Desert Research; the Ben-Gurion Research Institute for the Study of Israel & Zionism, and Heksherim – The Research Institute for Jewish and Israeli Literature and Culture.
Prof. Kobi Gal is a faculty member of the Department of Software and Information Systems Engineering at the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, and a Reader at the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh. His work investigates representations and algorithms for making decisions in heterogeneous groups comprising both people and computational agents. He has worked on combining artificial intelligence algorithms with educational technology towards supporting students in their learning and teachers to understand how students learn. He has published widely in highly refereed venues on topics ranging from artificial intelligence to the learning and cognitive sciences. Gal is the recipient of the Wolf foundation’s 2013 Krill prize for young Israeli scientists, a Marie Curie International fellowship, and a three-time recipient of Harvard University’s outstanding teacher award. Together with his co-authors, he has won the best student paper at UMAP-19, the best paper at EC 2016, and the best student paper at EDM 2014.