Technion student named by MIT journal as one of world's top inventors

Dr. Kira Rudinsky began studying at Haifa's world-renowned institution at the age of 15.

By JUDY SIEGEL-ITZKOVICH
Dr. Kira Radinsky of the Technion Institute 370 (photo credit: Courtesy Technion)
Dr. Kira Radinsky of the Technion Institute 370
(photo credit: Courtesy Technion)
Dr. Kira Rudinsky, an outstanding computer scientist who started studying at Haifa’s Technion-Israel Institute of Technology at the age of 15 and just completed her doctorate, has been named by the journal MIT Technology Review as one of the 35 most impressive inventors in the world.
Rudinsky, 26, was chosen among hundreds of candidates around the world for the honor from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology honor for her work in programming. Journal editor Jason Pontin said that the founders of Google (Larry Page and Sergey Brin), Facebook (Mark Zuckerberg), Tumblr (David Karp) and others were previous winners of this honor. “Over the years,” said Pontin, “we have been successful in choosing women and men whose inventions and the companies they established deeply influenced various trends in human society. We are proud of the winners and the variety of their achievements, and we are proud to add Kira to this honorable list.”
As a teenager, Rudinsky took part in the Technion’s program of excellence and went on to complete three degrees in computer sciences under the supervision of Prof. Shaul Markovitch. She developed a technique for predicting events with an average rate of accuracy of 80 percent by scanning literature written during the past 500 years. This included everything published in The New York Times since 1880. Rudinsky discovered that integrating information on famines and heavy storms was a way of predicting the breakout of cholera. Today, she is in contact with medical organizations for implementing her research findings and finding solutions for suffering populations.
During her studies, she went to the work in Microsoft and established with colleagues a company called SalesPredict, which has already raised a million dollars in funding. It predicts sales for commercial firms, helping some of its clients to improve the effectiveness of their sales programs. Rudinsky has received numerous prizes, including some from Google, Yahoo and Facebook.
“Kira is a brilliant researcher with many unique qualities that justify her inclusion in the list,” said Markovitch “She brings together intellectual ability, creativity, curiosity and daring -- a rare combination in inventors who excel. In her doctoral work, she focused on a seemingly insoluble problem -- the development of algorithms with the power to predict global events by using huge collections of Internet data. Her daring in selecting the problem and her scientific ability for solving the problem brought her to be included in the MIT list.”
Upon being named for the honor, Rudinsky said: “It is a great honor to join the Young Inventors list of MIT Technology Review. I hope it will encourage other Israeli researchers to get involved in the field to build Israel up as a powerhouse in empirical research.”