Hacking for fun
Jerusalem College of Technology offers students — including Jersey boys — tough technical challenges
Zev Tovbin described the recent Jerusalem College of Technology hackathon as “tough but a lot of fun.”
Mr. Tovbin grew up in Bergenfield and went to high school at the Torah Academy of Bergen County in Teaneck. He moved to Israel with his family a few years ago, and now he is a second-year computer science student at the college. He also was a member of the team that placed second at the hackathon. He found the process of working with his teammates to “come up with interesting solutions to complex problems” to be “really gratifying.”
Peretz Levin, who also grew up in Bergenfield, was on the team too. Mr. Levin graduated from MTA, Yeshiva University’s High School for Boys in Manhattan, moved to Israel on his own, and is now a third-year computer science student at JCT.
The six-person team, which also included JCT students Yehuda Gurovich, Eliyahu Masinter, Benji Tusk, and Ely van Dijk, developed a wiretap analysis platform to help law enforcement agents identify money-laundering patterns.
The hackathon is an opportunity for students to get hands-on practice building products and gain programming or engineering experience, Orlee Guttman said. She’s JCT’s director of strategic partnerships and the co-founder of JCT’s Schreiber LevTech Entrepreneurship Center. The hackathon, which is coordinated by the center, also gives students experience collaborating with industry professionals and addressing real-world challenges.
A hackathon is a 48-hour technology marathon, Ms. Guttman said. The center gets challenges from industry that involve building a product that performs a particular function or solves a particular problem. Challenges come from different sectors, including the defense industry, emergency services providers, technology companies, and startups. Students form teams and choose the challenges they want to work on. Having this choice is important, she stressed, because “it’s important the students feel passionate about what they’re about to spend 48 hours doing.” Industry leaders from companies that have presented challenges, and from other companies as well, mentor students during the hackathon.
The hackathon has a “fun atmosphere,” Ms. Guttman added. “You literally feel electricity in the air, you see drones flying sometimes, you see your friends working on very cool innovations, and what’s really exciting is that the rules require participants to learn new technologies.
“It’s very important to us that the students learn to learn on their own, because when they get to industry, it’s not going to be just about what they studied in school. That is a great basis, but they’re constantly going to have to learn new technologies and adapt, and that is one of the things that we try to teach in the hackathon.”
JCT is an engineering, business, and health sciences college based in Jerusalem. It’s also a religious school and offers a dual curriculum that includes Judaic studies. The school has separate campuses for men and women, and each school has its own single-sex hackathon. The college’s approximately 4,500 students generally come from religiously observant Israeli communities, ranging from religious Zionist to charedi, Ms. Guttman said.
Ms. Guttman co-founded the Schreiber LevTech Entrepreneurship Center to help students gain exposure to industry. “We realized that we had really smart students who were not getting the experience they would benefit from,” she said. “We also saw that we have many students, graduates, and faculty members who have great ideas for products and startups, because they’re very intelligent and creative, but there was no platform for them to put that into practice and get products to market.”
The center runs a variety of programs in addition to annual hackathons, from seminars geared to beginner stages that focus on an introduction to entrepreneurship or on creating products, to pre-accelerator and accelerator programs where people take their ideas for products or startups and really build them into something that they can get to market. “So we run programs that cover the gamut of the different stages of entrepreneurship,” she said.
Ms. Guttman is originally from Montreal. She lived in Israel for a few years in the 1990s and has a master’s degree in public health from Hebrew University. Then she moved to New York and lived there for 14 years, earning an executive MBA from Yeshiva University’s Sy Syms School of Business. Her background is in Jewish community work and health and in combining industry and academia. She returned to Israel in 2015 to work at JCT, “in order to bridge the gap between industry and academia and to work on charedi employment,” she said. “Those were my dreams.
“So I get to live my dream every single day.”
The Schreiber Center coordinated its first hackathon in 2016 and started its other entrepreneurship programs the following year. “Now we work with hundreds of students every single year in our different programs,” Ms. Guttman said. The center’s pre-accelerator programs are 12 weeks long. “Students, graduates, and faculty can come either with an idea for a product or with skills they can contribute to a product or startup.” The program focuses on what is involved in creating a startup. “We teach them the different components — building your startup team, the legal aspects, the financial aspects, how to make sure that your product fits the market, how to create a lean business plan — to enable them to take their idea and further develop it into a product or startup.”
The center offers an accelerator program for graduates of the pre-accelerator program. “In that program, we bring in a lot of mentors from industry with different areas of expertise to really work with the teams to get their products to market.”
The center also brings in experts from industry to teach new technology. “The academic side of JCT is excellent, but academia all over the world has set curriculum,” Ms. Guttman said. “If something new comes onto the market, you can’t build an academic course and curriculum that quickly, but we can bring in lecturers from one week to the next to teach technologies. We can work quite quickly.”
The center’s programs have incubated quite a few companies. Flycomm is a “very advanced communications mapping company” that “enables someone to map out where there is more coverage and less coverage, let’s say for mobile communications companies, just using an app on their phone, has a number of clients,” Ms. Guttman said.
“Rishumon created a platform for schools to centralize all their data and is now working with hundreds of schools. Schools used to use lots of different Excel sheets and different computer programs for student registration and interviews and recordkeeping. Rishumon has centralized all this in one place, and the program saves schools thousands of hours each year.”
Then there’s ScheduLearn, a company that got its start at JCT’s 2022 hackathon based on a challenge provided by Rishumon. “It feels like ScheduLearn is my grandchild,” Ms. Guttman said. When a school or another organization puts together a schedule, it has to take a lot of factors into account — things like the courses that must be taught, teachers’ time constraints, prerequisites that must be offered first, different student levels. “Schools often have a person just to do that scheduling, and it can take months over the summer with all the different constraints. With ScheduLearn, all of that is put into the system, and it can be done in minutes.” The company now has paying clients in Israel and the United States.
The hackathon team that included Mr. Tovbin and Mr. Levin chose a challenge, presented by Sekerbank, to develop a way to help law enforcement draw information from audio communications between suspected criminals by transcribing and analyzing the data to detect keywords and identify patterns in the communications. The team chose the challenge because its members felt that they had the background to bring it to fruition but that working on it also would be a learning experience for them. “We had the knowledge to start working on the product, but we did not believe that we had everything we needed,” Mr. Levin said. “Everyone on the team learned something new, and that was something that really gave us the drive to choose that challenge and work on it. “
Another factor in their decision was the fact that “wiretap detection is something that’s very important,” he added. “And it’s something that Sekerbank very much needed. Essentially, they were doing all of this work manually — inputting and listening to all of the voice recordings. Obviously, people are very prone to errors. Technology is too, but when it’s built well enough and efficiently enough that it surpasses that human error margin, then certainly it’s better to automate. And that’s something that we saw that we could significantly improve.”
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