Intel Launches AI Research Center in Israel in Collaboration With the Technion

Chipmaker Intel and The Technion-Israel Institute of Technology on Monday inaugurated a new research center dedicated to artificial intelligence technologies. Intel chief technology officer Michael Mayberry and Naveen Rao, Intel’s corporate vice president and general manager of the AI products group attended the event. The two arrived in Israel Sunday as part of a delegation of several dozens of Intel’s top management that includes the company’s interim CEO Robert Swan.

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Shie Mannor, a professor at the Technion’s Andrew and Erna Viterbi Faculty of Electrical Engineering, will head the center. “As part of this collaboration with Intel, the company will support research projects of Technion faculty members engaged in computational learning and artificial intelligence together with Intel researchers,” Mannor said in a statement. “The research will cover a variety of areas, including natural language processing, deep learning, and hardware optimization for different learning algorithms,” he said.

Intel’s executive visit to Israel was organized by Amnon Shashua, CEO of autonomous vehicle technology company Mobileye, which was acquired by Intel in 2017 for $15.3 billion. Wendell Brooks, senior vice president of Intel and president of Intel Capital, Doug Davis, senior vice president and general manager of the automated driving group, and Sandra Rivera, senior vice president and general manager of the network platforms group, are among the visiting executives.

On Tuesday, the delegation is scheduled to meet with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Intel launched its operations in Israel in 1974. Since then, its local facilities have produced $50-billion worth of goods, according to the company, who also stated it made local investments and acquisitions to the tune of $35 billion. Intel employs about 12,000 people in Israel, including some 1,000 Mobileye employees. Intel said it was responsible for $3.6 billion of Israel’s exports in 2017, which represents about 8% of the country’s total tech exports. In May, Intel submitted a $5-billion expansion plan of its Kiryat Gat chip manufacturing plant to the Israeli government. Israel has previously offered Intel a $380-million grant as an incentives to expand the plant.