Professor
Professor (commonly abbreviated as Prof.) is an Academy, academic rank at university, universities and other tertiary education, post-secondary education and research institutions in most countries. Literally, ''professor'' derives from Latin ...
(Emeritus) of
Physics
Physics is the scientific study of matter, its Elementary particle, fundamental constituents, its motion and behavior through space and time, and the related entities of energy and force. "Physical science is that department of knowledge whi ...
in the School of Physics and
Astronomy
Astronomy is a natural science that studies celestial objects and the phenomena that occur in the cosmos. It uses mathematics, physics, and chemistry in order to explain their origin and their overall evolution. Objects of interest includ ...
at
Tel Aviv University
Tel Aviv University (TAU) is a Public university, public research university in Tel Aviv, Israel. With over 30,000 students, it is the largest university in the country. Located in northwest Tel Aviv, the university is the center of teaching and ...
(TAU),
Israel
Israel, officially the State of Israel, is a country in West Asia. It Borders of Israel, shares borders with Lebanon to the north, Syria to the north-east, Jordan to the east, Egypt to the south-west, and the Mediterranean Sea to the west. Isr ...
. He has served as Vice- Rector of TAU, Chairman of the School of Physics and Astronomy and as
Dean
Dean may refer to:
People
* Dean (given name)
* Dean (surname), a surname of Anglo-Saxon English origin
* Dean (South Korean singer), a stage name for singer Kwon Hyuk
* Dean Delannoit, a Belgian singer most known by the mononym Dean
* Dean Sw ...
of the Faculty of
Exact Sciences
The exact sciences or quantitative sciences, sometimes called the exact mathematical sciences, are those sciences "which admit of absolute precision in their results"; especially the mathematical sciences. Examples of the exact sciences are ma ...
in TAU. He is a fellow of the American Physical Society, nominated for "contributions to theoretical particle physics, including the seminal work on finite energy sum rules, research of the phenomenology of hadronic processes, and investigation of Hamiltonian lattice theories".
Early life and education
David Horn was born and educated in
Haifa
Haifa ( ; , ; ) is the List of cities in Israel, third-largest city in Israel—after Jerusalem and Tel Aviv—with a population of in . The city of Haifa forms part of the Haifa metropolitan area, the third-most populous metropolitan area i ...
. He graduated from the
Reali School
The Hebrew Reali School of Haifa (), located in Haifa, Israel, is one of the country's oldest private schools.Technion in Haifa in 1957, and received his B.Sc. (Summa Cum Laude) in 1961, and M.Sc. in 1962. He continued his Ph.D. studies at the
Hebrew University of Jerusalem
The Hebrew University of Jerusalem (HUJI; ) is an Israeli public university, public research university based in Jerusalem. Co-founded by Albert Einstein and Chaim Weizmann in July 1918, the public university officially opened on 1 April 1925. ...
until 1965. His thesis on "Some Aspects of the Structure of Weak Interactions" was supervised by Prof.
Yuval Ne'eman
Yuval Ne'eman (; 14 May 1925 – 26 April 2006) was an Israeli theoretical physicist, military scientist, and politician. He was Minister of Science and Development in the 1980s and early 1990s. He was the President of Tel Aviv University ...
.
Career
Horn joined the newly founded Tel Aviv University as an assistant in 1962. He became a lecturer in 1965, a senior lecturer in 1967 and an associate professor in 1968. He was promoted to full professor of Physics in 1972. In 1974 he became the incumbent of the Edouard and Francoise Jaupart Chair of Theoretical Physics of Particles and Fields, a position he held until 2007. Horn has supervised 43 graduate students at TAU and authored over 240 scientific publications. He retired as a professor emeritus in 2005, and continues to be an active researcher.
Horn spent a significant part of his career holding visiting academic positions at other universities and research institutes, including: Postdoctoral Fellow at Argonne National Lab, ILL, Research Fellow and three times Visiting Associate at
California Institute of Technology
The California Institute of Technology (branded as Caltech) is a private research university in Pasadena, California, United States. The university is responsible for many modern scientific advancements and is among a small group of institutes ...
,
Pasadena
Pasadena ( ) is a city in Los Angeles County, California, United States, northeast of downtown Los Angeles. It is the most populous city and the primary cultural center of the San Gabriel Valley. Old Pasadena is the city's original commercial d ...
, CA, Visitor at
CERN
The European Organization for Nuclear Research, known as CERN (; ; ), is an intergovernmental organization that operates the largest particle physics laboratory in the world. Established in 1954, it is based in Meyrin, western suburb of Gene ...
in
Geneva
Geneva ( , ; ) ; ; . is the List of cities in Switzerland, second-most populous city in Switzerland and the most populous in French-speaking Romandy. Situated in the southwest of the country, where the Rhône exits Lake Geneva, it is the ca ...
, Visiting Professor at
Cornell University
Cornell University is a Private university, private Ivy League research university based in Ithaca, New York, United States. The university was co-founded by American philanthropist Ezra Cornell and historian and educator Andrew Dickson W ...
, NY, Member of the
Institute for Advanced Study
The Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) is an independent center for theoretical research and intellectual inquiry located in Princeton, New Jersey. It has served as the academic home of internationally preeminent scholars, including Albert Ein ...
,
Princeton, NJ
The Municipality of Princeton is a Borough (New Jersey), borough in Mercer County, New Jersey, United States. It was established on January 1, 2013, through the consolidation of the Borough of Princeton, New Jersey, Borough of Princeton and Pri ...
, Visiting Professor at
SLAC
SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, originally named the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center,
is a federally funded research and development center in Menlo Park, California, United States. Founded in 1962, the laboratory is now sponsored ...
in
Stanford University
Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University, is a Private university, private research university in Stanford, California, United States. It was founded in 1885 by railroad magnate Leland Stanford (the eighth ...
, CA, and Visiting Professor at
Kyoto University
, or , is a National university, national research university in Kyoto, Japan. Founded in 1897, it is one of the former Imperial Universities and the second oldest university in Japan.
The university has ten undergraduate faculties, eighteen gra ...
,
Japan
Japan is an island country in East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean off the northeast coast of the Asia, Asian mainland, it is bordered on the west by the Sea of Japan and extends from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea ...
.
Beginning from 1980, Horn held official positions at Tel Aviv University, starting with tenure as Vice-Rector (1980-1983), a position he left for research at SLAC. After returning he was nominated Chairman of the Department of High Energy Physics (1984-1986), followed by tenures as Chairman of the School of Physics and Astronomy (1986-9), Dean of the Raymond and Beverly Sackler Faculty of Exact Sciences (1990-1995), and first Director of the Adams Super Center for Brain Studies (1993-2000).
Horn has also held national and international professional positions. He was Chairman of the Israel Commission for
High Energy Physics
Particle physics or high-energy physics is the study of fundamental particles and forces that constitute matter and radiation. The field also studies combinations of elementary particles up to the scale of protons and neutrons, while the stu ...
(1983-2003), and, in this capacity, served as an Israeli observer of the council of CERN (1991-2003).
He served as member of the
Israel Council for Higher Education
The Council for Higher Education in Israel (, ''HaMo'atza LeHaskala Gevoha'') is a supervisory body for universities and colleges in Israel. It is the only organization with the authority to award academic educational accreditation. The head of th ...
(1987-1991), member of the Executive Committee of the
European Physical Society
The European Physical Society (EPS) is a non-profit organisation whose purpose is to promote physics and physicists in Europe through methods such as physics outreach, supporting physicists to engage in the design and implementation of European s ...
(1989-1992) and member of the European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures (2005-2017). He chaired the Israeli Committee of Research Infrastructures (2012-2016), issuing roadmaps for scientific RI in 2013 and 2016.
Research
Horn's research work focused on theory and phenomenology of High Energy Physics until 1990. He then shifted his interests to
Neural Computation
Neural computation is the information processing performed by networks of neurons. Neural computation is affiliated with the philosophical tradition known as Computational theory of mind, also referred to as computationalism, which advances the th ...
and
Machine Learning
Machine learning (ML) is a field of study in artificial intelligence concerned with the development and study of Computational statistics, statistical algorithms that can learn from data and generalise to unseen data, and thus perform Task ( ...
and, since 2005, he has also published in
Bioinformatics
Bioinformatics () is an interdisciplinary field of science that develops methods and Bioinformatics software, software tools for understanding biological data, especially when the data sets are large and complex. Bioinformatics uses biology, ...
.
Together with Richard Dolen and Christoph Schmid he discovered the Finite Energy Sum Rules in 1967. It was a realization of the bootstrap approach to hadronic structure, and became known as the Dolen-Horn-Schmid Duality.
Together with Richard Silver he investigated a model of coherent production of
pions
In particle physics, a pion (, ) or pi meson, denoted with the Greek letter pi (), is any of three subatomic particles: , , and . Each pion consists of a quark and an antiquark and is therefore a meson. Pions are the lightest mesons and, mo ...
at high energy
hadron
In particle physics, a hadron is a composite subatomic particle made of two or more quarks held together by the strong nuclear force. Pronounced , the name is derived . They are analogous to molecules, which are held together by the electri ...
collisions in 1971,
and together with Jeffrey Mandula he undertook the investigation of
meson
In particle physics, a meson () is a type of hadronic subatomic particle composed of an equal number of quarks and antiquarks, usually one of each, bound together by the strong interaction. Because mesons are composed of quark subparticles, the ...
s with constituent
gluons
A gluon ( ) is a type of massless elementary particle that mediates the strong interaction between quarks, acting as the exchange particle for the interaction. Gluons are massless vector bosons, thereby having a spin of 1. Through the s ...
in 1978.
Moving to lattice gauge theories in 1979, he discovered, together with Shimon Yankielowic and Marvin Weinstein, a non-confining phase in Z(N) theories for large N.
In 1981 he demonstrated the existence of finite matrix models with link gauge fields, nowadays known as quantum link models.
In 1984 Horn and Weinstein developed the t-expansion methodology.
Horn's contributions to neural modeling include a novel mechanism for memory maintenance via neuronal regulation in 1998, developed with Nir Levy and Eytan Ruppin
and unsupervised learning of
natural languages
A natural language or ordinary language is a language that occurs naturally in a human community by a process of use, repetition, and Language change, change. It can take different forms, typically either a spoken language or a sign language. Na ...
in 2005, a joint work with Zach Solan, Eytan Ruppin and Shimon Edelman, introducing novel
algorithm
In mathematics and computer science, an algorithm () is a finite sequence of Rigour#Mathematics, mathematically rigorous instructions, typically used to solve a class of specific Computational problem, problems or to perform a computation. Algo ...
s for motif and grammar extraction from text. Horn has contributed to algorithms of clustering, an important topic in Machine Learning, by developing Support Vector Clustering (SVC) in 2001, together with Asa Ben Hur, Hava Siegelmann and Vladimir Vapnik. This was followed shortly thereafter by a joint work with Assaf Gottlieb on Quantum Clustering (QC).
His contributions to Bioinformatics include motif descriptions of function and structure of
protein
Proteins are large biomolecules and macromolecules that comprise one or more long chains of amino acid residue (biochemistry), residues. Proteins perform a vast array of functions within organisms, including Enzyme catalysis, catalysing metab ...
s, as well as motif studies of genomic structures. Together with Erez Persi he studied compositional order of
proteomes
A proteome is the entire set of proteins that is, or can be, expressed by a genome, cell, tissue, or organism at a certain time. It is the set of expressed proteins in a given type of cell or organism, at a given time, under defined conditions. P ...
, and repeat instability of genomes, as evolution markers of organisms and of
cancer
Cancer is a group of diseases involving Cell growth#Disorders, abnormal cell growth with the potential to Invasion (cancer), invade or Metastasis, spread to other parts of the body. These contrast with benign tumors, which do not spread. Po ...
(a joint work with Persi and others).
Honors
Horn is a Fellow of the American Physical Society (1985) and a Fellow of the Israel Physical Society (2018).
Publications
Selected articles
* R. Dolen, D. Horn and C. Schmid; Prediction of Regge-parameters of rho poles from low-energy pi-N scattering data Phys. Rev. Lett. 19 (1967) 402–407. Finite-Energy Sum Rules and Their Application to pi-N Charge Exchange Phys. Rev. 166 (1968) 1768–1781.
* D. Horn and R. Silver: Coherent production of pions, Annals Phys. 66 (1971) 509-541
* T. Banks, D. Horn and H. Neuberger: Bosonization of the SU(N) Thirring Models, Nucl. Phys. B108, 119 (1976).
* D. Horn and J. Mandula: Model of Mesons with Constituent Gluons, Phys. Rev. D17, 898 (1978).
* D. Horn, M. Weinstein and S. Yankielowicz: Hamiltonian Approach to Z(N) Lattice Gauge Theories, Phys. Rev. D19, 3715 (1979).
* D. Horn: Finite Matrix Models with Continuous Local Gauge Invariance, Phys. Lett. 100B, 149-151 (1981).
* T. Banks, Y. Dothan and D. Horn: Geometric Fermions, Phys. Lett. 117B, 413 (1982).
* D. Horn and M. Weinstein: The t expansion: A nonperturbative analytic tool for Hamiltonian systems. Phys. Rev. D 30, 1256-1270 (1984).
* Ury Naftaly, Nathan Intrator and David Horn: Optimal Ensemble Averaging of Neural Networks. Network, Computation in Neural Systems, 8, 283-296 (1997).
* David Horn, Nir Levy, Eytan Ruppin: Memory Maintenance via Neuronal Regulation, Neural Computation, 10, 1-18 (1998).
* Asa Ben-Hur, David Horn, Hava Siegelmann and Vladimir Vapnik: Support Vector Clustering. Journal of Machine Learning Research 2, 125-137 (2001).
* David Horn and Assaf Gottlieb: Algorithm for data clustering in pattern recognition problems based on quantum mechanics, Phys. Rev. Lett. 88 (2002) 18702
* Zach Solan, David Horn, Eytan Ruppin and Shimon Edelman: Unsupervised learning of natural languages, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sc. 102 (2005) 11629–11634.
* Vered Kunik, Yasmine Meroz, Zach Solan, Ben Sandbank, Uri Weingart, Eytan Ruppin and David Horn: Functional representation of enzymes by specific peptides. PLOS Computational Biology 2007, 3(8):e167.
*
Benny Chor
Ben-Zion "Benny" Chor (; 23 December 1956 – 10 June 2021) was an Israeli computer scientist. He was known for his research in cryptography, including traitor tracing, randomness extractors, private information retrieval, the security level and ...
, David Horn, Yaron Levy, Nick Goldman and Tim Massingham: Genomic DNA k-mer spectra: models and modalities. Genome Biology 2009, 10(10):R108
* Erez Persi and David Horn. Systematic Analysis of Compositional Order of Proteins Reveals New Characteristics of Biological Functions and a Universal Correlate of Macroevolution. PLoS Comput Biol 9 (2013): e1003346.
* David Horn. Taxa counting using Specific Peptides of Aminoacyl tRNA Synthetases Encyclopedia of Metagenomics, Springer, 2013.
* Sagi Shporer, Benny Chor, Saharon Rosset, David Horn. Inversion symmetry of DNA k-mer counts: validity and deviations. BMC Genomics 2016, 17:696
* Erez Persi, Davide Prandi, Yuri I. Wolf, Yair Pozniak, Christopher Barbieri, Paola Gasperini, Himisha Beltran, Bishoy M. Faltas, Mark A. Rubin, Tamar Geiger, Eugene V. Koonin, Francesca Demichelis, David Horn. Proteomic and Genomic Signatures of Repeat Instability in Cancer and Adjacent Normal Tissues. PNAS 116, 34, 2019 - 08790
Book
* David Horn and Fredrick Zachariasen: Hadron Physics at Very High Energies. Benjamin 1973.
Patents
* Method and Apparatus for Quantum Clustering. USA Patent No. 7,653,646 B2.
* Method for discovering relationships in data by dynamic quantum clustering USA Patent No 8874412 and USA Patent No. 9,646,074.
Personal life
Horn was married to Nira Fuss since 1963 until her death in 2019. He is a father of three, Yuval, Tamar, and Oded, and grandfather of nine. He lives in
Tel Aviv
Tel Aviv-Yafo ( or , ; ), sometimes rendered as Tel Aviv-Jaffa, and usually referred to as just Tel Aviv, is the most populous city in the Gush Dan metropolitan area of Israel. Located on the Israeli Mediterranean coastline and with a popula ...
YouTube
YouTube is an American social media and online video sharing platform owned by Google. YouTube was founded on February 14, 2005, by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim who were three former employees of PayPal. Headquartered in ...