From the Spotlight
Roee Diamant - Marine Technologies
Roee Diamant received the PhD from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of British Columbia, in 2013, and the B.Sc. and the M.Sc. degrees from the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology, in 2002 and 2007, respectively, and was a visiting Prof. at the University of Padova, Italy, in 2015-2016. From 2001-2009 and 2013-2015, he was with Rafael Advanced Defense Systems Ltd. as a project manager and system engineer. Currently, he is leading the underwater acoustic and navigation laboratory (ANL) as a senior lecturer at the Dept. of Marine Technology, University of Haifa. Among other projects, the ANL is incharge of the THEMO project for constructing a marine observatory off the coast of Israel. Dr. Diamant is currently involved in three active research grants. His NATO Science for Peace project is focused on securing offshore energy facilities against diver intruders and underwater mines. The aim is to detect and classify acoustic signals to detect reflections whose characteristics point of possible divers, and to analyze sonar images to detect submerged mines. His grant with the Israeli Natural Authority focuses on the localization and motion pattern analysis of acoustically tagged Lobsters in the Achziv marine reserve. And his grant from the United States Foreign Military Financing is geared towards supplying visual aids to improve the navigation of autonomous underwater vehicles. Recently, Dr. Diamant headed an international academic and industry group in applying to the EU Horizon 2020 BG-14 grant. The project suggested will develop an autonomous scheme to detect, classify, and estimate the bio mass of six species of Pelagic fish. The output of the system will be a pre-commercial prototype that will be tested in three marine observatories.
Guy Bar-Oz - Archaeology
Guy Bar-Oz is a professor of archaeology at University of Haifa. His research focuses on four main subject fields: (1) evolution of human hunting and subsistence behavior in prehistory, (2) development of complex economic-subsistence systems in the historic periods of the Near East, (3) human impact on ancient environment, and (4) collapse and resilience of past societies in marginal environments. His fieldwork in archaeology and zoology includes excavation and analysis of numerous prehistoric and historic bone assemblages in Israel and the Caucasus (Republic of Georgia and Armenia).
He is currently the head of the Negev Byzantine Bio-Archaeology Research Program (a European Research Council and Israel Science Foundation supported project), which addresses an important pair of questions: how were the Byzantines able to erect a flourishing infrastructure in the Negev Desert, and why, approximately 1,500 years ago, did they eventually fail? The project bears crucial implications for present-day concerns with sustainable development.
