Alexander (Sasha) Apartsin, Ph.D.
Alexander (Sasha) Apartsin is a faculty member in the School of Computer Science at the Holon Institute of Technology, an AI scientist, and an educator with three decades of hands-on software engineering, research, and technical leadership experience. He holds a B.Sc. in Computer Science from the Technion (Israel Institute of Technology), an M.Sc. in Computer Science from the Weizmann Institute of Science, an M.Sc. in Management from the Polytechnic Institute of NYU, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Tel Aviv University. He completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Weizmann Institute.
His research focuses on deep generative models applied to NLP, computer vision, and robotics, with a particular emphasis on synthetic data generation for training and evaluation in education, healthcare, and defense sectors where labeled data is scarce. He holds eight patents in machine learning optimization and signal processing.
Before entering academia full-time, Dr. Apartsin led data science and research teams across the technology sector, serving as Head of Data Science in automotive AI, Head of Research at a global communications company's innovation center, and AVP of Data Science at a major financial institution's innovation lab. His industry work spans diverse data modalities (images, text, speech, time series, and recommender systems) and application domains including finance, public safety, predictive maintenance, education, and enterprise data management. His earlier career spanned two decades in software architecture and product development roles.
An experienced educator across multiple institutions, Dr. Apartsin has designed and taught a wide range of AI courses spanning large language models, AI agents, generative AI, NLP, computer vision, big data analytics, and deep learning at both the graduate and undergraduate levels. He uses an Innovation-First Learning pedagogy that integrates theory and practical tools from day one. He has advised B.Sc. and M.Sc. students for over a decade.
Yehudit Aperstein, Ph.D.
Yehudit Aperstein is a faculty member in the Department of Intelligent Systems at Afeka Academic College of Engineering, and an AI/ML scientist and educator with extensive experience in initiating, managing, and consulting on applied research projects in artificial intelligence, machine learning, deep learning, data mining, and time series analysis. She holds an M.Sc. in Game Theory from the Technion (Israel Institute of Technology) and a Ph.D. in Mathematical Economics from the Weizmann Institute of Science, followed by a postdoctoral fellowship in Financial Mathematics at Bar-Ilan University.
She founded and directed the M.Sc. Program in Intelligent Systems at Afeka Tel Aviv Academic College of Engineering (2016 to 2023), building a graduate curriculum that spans AI, deep learning, reinforcement learning, NLP, multi-agent systems, computer vision, time series analysis, healthcare intelligent systems, autonomous vehicles, and optimization. She has been on the Afeka faculty since 2008.
In 2024 she founded ICSGen.AI, the Afeka Interdisciplinary Center for Social Good and Generative AI, which conducts cross-domain applied research at the intersection of generative AI, healthcare, and social impact. She previously led the Afeka Center for Data Mining and Decision Making (2013 to 2020), directing applied research spanning computer vision, NLP, signal processing, and financial and medical data analytics. Dr. Aperstein has led numerous collaborative research projects with defense organizations and industry partners, and has secured competitive research grants in the field of intelligent systems.