First degree, MSc and PhD in Computer Science at the Technion.
Post – Doc at Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.
Participated in the Technion Excellence Program: 2003 – 2006.
Through the Excellence Program, more doors were opened outside his faculty. For example, Sivan could register and learn advance courses in the Electrical Engineering faculty, without taking the required preliminaries. Also, Sivan was exposed to more research opportunities, some of which were due to the lectures organized by the Program.
“The Excellence Program, being a well known establishment throughout the Technion, provided me with a key to “open doors” outside my faculty. For example, I could register and learn advance courses in the Electrical Engineering faculty and in the Biology faculty without taking the required preliminaries. As a member of the program, I was exposed to more research opportunities, some of which were due to the lectures organized by the Program.”
During his first degree, Sivan joined several research projects in a rich set of fields, ranging from computer-architectures (with Gontmacher Alex and Dr. Mendelson Avi), to distributed-systems – under the supervision of Dr. Idit Keidar, Dr. Ayellet Tal and Yaniv Frishman from the Electrical Engineering faculty and Prof. Assaf Schuster from the Computer Science faculty, and Bioinformatics with Assoc. Prof. Pinter Ron and Prof. Geiger Dan. It was the research conducted during the first degree that brought him closer to the interesting and applicative field of Bioinformatics.
Apart from winning the “Kasher” award in the Electrical Engineering faculty, and an honorable mention in the Technion’s creative project competition, the research he conducted in the field of distributed-applications bear fruit, and a paper was published (“Decentralized Electronic Mail”, accepted to the First International Workshop on Dynamic Distributed Systems, 2006).
Recommendation to Program participants: “Try to make the best out of the academic freedom offered by the Program. Invest your time examining different fields. Enrich your imagination by learning about problems and their solutions from as many and as diverse fields as you can. Sometimes, solutions from one field can solve problems from another”.
Today (2018): CTO at Karius, a next-generation infectious disease diagnostics company, running Engineering, Data, and Analytics.
Building bridges between academia and industry, with a focus on machine-learning, distributed-systems, software, and molecular-biology. An active member of the entrepreneurial community in the valley.
Throughout his academic career, Dr. Bercovici has been developing novel mathematical models and algorithms that address broad challenges in genetics and the study of human disease, with immediate implications for preventive and therapeutic solutions. Prior to Karius, Dr. Bercovici was a co-founder and Chief Technology Officer at Lifecode, where he led the development of Lifecode’s analytical platform and validation of several clinical assays based on next-generation sequencing. Dr. Bercovici holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology. Dr. Bercovici was a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, where he continues to contribute as a Senior Research Scientist.
