How are you profiting by improving the world?
I am gaining answers to my curiosity.

As a child when given the question, “If you could ask a genie for anything, what would your 3 wishes be?” I always answered with one wish: “I wish I knew everything.”
 

Most of the things I do are motivated by an inherit need to know what will happen, how the world works, and what the implications of certain actions will be.
 

Every discovery we make, any new improvement we achieve gives me the ultimate answer to whether it was indeed possible. Each discover and improvement starts to have a life of its own – sometimes different from what I myself could have predicted.

Home
Home is Israel. It is a home I was given as a present when I was just 4 years old when my family emigrated from Kiev, Ukraine. Since then it has given me the education and the stimulus I was after – both social and intellectual. I was given the option to flourish in any way I dreamed. Today it is my turn to make Israel home for others.

Money
I consider money as an enabler of experiences – travels, foods, shows, books, etc. But money has no worth for people who don’t use it to create those experiences.

A lot of it is how you perceive the world. Every moment that you have can be just another boring day or it can be a weaving of moments of new and exciting experiences.

Israel favorites
Shimon Peres – for being a pioneer in building a dream that eventually becomes a country and for keeping all his optimism about the future.

Shafi Goldwaser – for unique contribution to the field of computer science that has led her to receive the Turing award.

When should I buy my airline ticket from the Philadelphia area to Porto Alegre, Brasil, to visit the last 2 weeks of December and the first week of January?  
Predictive models have been with us for dozens of years. Today, however, with the abundance of data that is structured and therefore readable by computer software, advances in natural language processing and the predictive model algorithms give us options to predict events we never could have before.

This year in Nature magazine there was a series of articles describing the attempts to predict crime and terror events.  Using a database of such events since the 1960s the algorithms were able to come up with patterns in those events. Specifically, the algorithms found that many of the events follow a mathematical law – the power law. The power law is also used to predict the strength of earthquakes and the frequency of words in language. This is just an example of how there are patterns behind many types of events – especially human actions. Used in this fashion, the algorithms are able to predict where crimes will happen in San Francisco. This will help the police of that city better allocate resources to prevent crime and protect the public.