Team
Prof. Ofer Arazy, Project’s PI.
Department of Information Systems, University of Haifa.
Ofer Arazy is a Professor of Information Systems, and his research is in the area of social computing, human computation, and human judgement. At the University of Haifa, Ofer’s roles include the Director of Innovation & Sustainability and the Head of Haifa Innovation Labs (HIL). Prof. Arazy is also co-founder of Israel’s iNaturalist node and the Chair of the Scientific Committee for Israel’s Citizen Science Initiative.
Email: oarazy@is.haifa.ac.il
Website: http://oferarazy.com
Prof. Dan Malkinson, Project’s PI.
Department of Geography and Environmental Studies, University of Haifa.
Prof. Dan Malkinson is a Professor of Geography and Environmental Studies at the University of Haifa. He serves as the Director of the Kadas Green Roof Ecology Center and leads the ecology and environment research section at the Shamir Research Institute. Additionally, he co-chairs the International Geographical Union’s commission on Research Methods in Geography. Prof. Malkinson is also a co-founder of Israel’s iNaturalist node and a member of the Scientific Committee for Israel’s Citizen Science Initiative.
Email: dmalk@geo.haifa.ac.il
Website: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=7aAUA6oAAAAJ&hl=en
Dr. Yuval Nov, Project’s PI.
School of Public Health, University of Haifa.
Email: yuval@stat.haifa.ac.il
Prof. Ilan Shimshoni. Project’s PI.
Department of Information Systems, University of Haifa
Ilan Shimshoni is a Professor of Information Systems. His research areas are computer vision, computer graphics and robotics. In recent years he has also been developing algorithms in CV for solving problems in Archeology, Rehabilitation, Geography, and especially ecology and agriculture. He served as the chair of the IS department and was an Associate Editor for IEEE TPAMI, the leading journal in the field of computer vision.
Email: ishimshoni1959@gmail.com
Website: https://sites.google.com/is.haifa.ac.il/ilan-shimshoni/home
Dr. Yiftach Nagar
Academic College of Tel Aviv-Yaffo, and Department of Information Systems, University of Haifa.
Dr. Yiftach Nagar is an assistant professor at the Academic College of Tel Aviv-Yaffo, and a research fellow at the department of information systems at the University of Haifa, who explores novel ways of combining and organizing the work of AI, crowds and experts, for addressing complex problems. Yiftach earned his PhD from MIT, where he worked on the Climate Colab – a global citizen-science platform that aims to harness the collective intelligence of people around the world for addressing climate change and other societal challenges.
Email: ynagar@alum.mit.edu
Website: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=W_mxWSMAAAAJ&hl=en
Post Doctoral Fellows
Dr. Orit Hirsch-Matsioulas
Dr. Orit Hirsch-Matsioulas is an anthropologist specializing in human–animal relations. She also serves as a lecturer in the Multidisciplinary Department. In recent years, her research has focused on Animal–Computer Interaction (ACI) and on the intersections between citizen science, technology, and nature. She is a co-founder of the Israeli Human–Animal Studies academic community (HASI).
Inbal Goldstein schekler
Students and Research Assistants
Nitsan Bar-Shmuel
Project manager and community leader of the wild mushroom monitoring project in Israel. PhD supervised by Dan Malkinson and Tamir Klein
Email: nitsanber@gmail.com
Ravit Ben-Shoushan.
Gazelles in Space: Developing AI and remote-sensing tools to assess demography and spatial distribution patterns. detect medium sized species, using Very High-Resolution (VHR) satellite images.
Elior Julyan
Exploring the limits of individual identification of Wild Boars by experts and crowds. Department of Information Systems, University of Haifa. M.A. supervised by Yiftach Nagar and Ofer Arazy.
Amir Kedem
Multiple Object Tracking (MoT) with fixed cameras setting
Lior Koren
Videos of wild boars: detection’ , tracking’ pose estimation gender classification and reidntification. Department of Information Systems, University of Haifa. M.A. supervised by Ilan Shimshoni.
Yoav Ofer
Perceptions and Preferences in Nature Monitoring: a VR Experiment. Department of Information Systems, University of Haifa. M.A. supervised by Ofer Arazy, Yiftach Nagar and Uri Hertz.
Weaam Shaheen
An integrated system of artificial intelligence and citizen science for tagging animal images. Department of Information Systems, University of Haifa. M.A. supervised by Yiftach Nagar and Ofer Arazy.
Tal Saphar
Automated identification of individual salamanders from images. Department of Information Systems, University of Haifa. M.A. supervised by Ilan Shimshoni.
Ori Shapira
Species and individual identification of predator species. Department of Geography and Environmental Studies, University of Haifa. PhD. supervised by Dan Malkinson.
Dr. Achiad Davidson
Leading the project for empirical verification in the field to correct bias in biodiversity monitoring in citizen science projects.
Former Students and Project Alumni
Ayala Granat
Developing a Crowd-Computing Platform for Biodiversity Monitoring
Lihi Cohen
Could a game simulation help to determine user’s preference? Department of Information Systems, University of Haifa. M.A. supervised by Dan Malkinson and Ofer Arazy.
Maria Nitsberg
Empirical validation of statistical model for bias-correction in unstructured citizen science biodiversity monitoring. Department of Information Systems, University of Haifa. M.A. supervised by Dan Malkinson and Ofer Arazy.
Bar Lavi
Data-science, database developer and administrator.
