Tel Aviv University, UC Irvine collaborate

In 2025, more than 8 billion people are projected to inhabit our globe, linked by advanced communication devices and techniques.

Israeli and American electrical engineers and computer scientists from Tel Aviv University (TAU), the University of California, Irvine (UCI) and industry will examine the shape of this future at the conference on Communications and Information Technology 2025, hosted by UC Irvine, Oct. 16-17.

If the recent past is a guide, the growth in communications will be explosive. Since 2000, telecommunication bandwidth has increased by 100,000 times, and the number of cell phone users from two per 1,000 people in 1990 to 500 per 1,000 today.

In the last eight years alone, Wikipedia has gone from 100 million words to 2 billion words in 249 languages.

A primary goal of the conference, said Gregory Washington, dean of UCI’s Henry Samueli School of Engineering, is to leverage the respective expertise of the UCI and TAU faculties toward the development of new research projects, new products and spinoff companies.

Besides advancing the state of the art in information technology, the conference signals the first results of recent UCI agreements for academic and student collaboration with Ben-Gurion University, Hebrew University, the Technion and TAU, spearheaded by UCI Chancellor Michael Drake.

In past years, the UCI campus has been in the news — at least the Jewish news — mainly for its history of incendiary denunciations of Israel, harassment of Jewish students, confrontations between Muslim and Jewish students, and charges that the campus administration failed to take remedial action.

In a counter measure, the Jewish Federation & Family Services of Orange County in 2008 established the Rose Project, charged with working with administration and student leaders to change the campus climate. The Rose Project — under director Lisa Armony, who has been an occasional freelance writer for the Journal — is a co-sponsor of the conference and will host the Oct. 15 “Celebration of the Israel-UCI Partnership” with Henry Samueli, chairman and co-founder of Broadcom Corp., and Israel Consul General in Los Angeles David Siegel. To register for this event, visit jewishorangecounty.org.

Siegel also will deliver a keynote address at the Oct. 16 conference dinner, as will Ehud Heyman, dean of the Iby and Aladar Fleischman Faculty of Engineering at TAU.

For information on the conference, visit