Shalom, Kira. Thank you for being with us.
Taking you back a few years ago, when you arrived in Israel at the age of four from Ukraine, a family of new immigrants, and you grew up in Nesher, sort of a geographic periphery, but quite quickly you became one of Israel's most successful high-tech entrepreneurs. When you look back at the early years, even when you were in high school or even middle school, what do you take back from that time in school, from your teachers and friends? What did you gain there that served you well later on in life?
So maybe let's start from the beginning. When my parents left the USSR, it was a very special place where engineers would get the lowest salaries and factory workers would get the highest. Everybody would get pretty much the same thing, but if you were specifically Jewish, there were certain jobs you couldn't do. You couldn't take any governmental jobs. Applying to university, we were prohibited from most universities. Unlike most worlds where you say if you have 20% of some population, the university should accept at least 20% of that subpopulation, instead the USSR had a cap. For example, in the University of Ukraine, only one Jewish person could be accepted every year. So in general, it wasn't a good place. And of course, nobody could leave because they were afraid that people would leave, see the West, see the devil in the West as well. And it all started changing when the USSR started falling apart, especially from a lot of the pressure coming in from the United States and Israel to at least let the Jews go. The official announcement was, well, we're letting the Jews go because they were never citizens to begin with. So I came from a family of only women: my mom, my aunt, my grandma. And only in 1990 they were allowed to leave. When you leave, you have to quit your job, then wait for a visa. So in other words, there's about six to nine months where you have no income. Additionally, it's illegal not to work in the USSR, so at any point you could get arrested for even wanting to leave. So when we came to Israel, you couldn't take anything with you, no money, very limited amount of luggage. You arrive with nothing. The only thing that we came with was our education, and I think that made the biggest difference. From the moment I can remember myself, my mom, she's also a teacher in high school, all of them were computer science engineers. They came to Israel and they said, we're going to start doing the first thing that we can do. We don't know the language, we came with nothing, but we can rebuild ourselves because we have the basics. We know how to make this work. And with a lot of optimism and knowledge, that's how they built themselves. So that's the thing they told me all the time: we're going to work, we're going to do everything possible, but you need to invest in your specific education. Since I can remember myself, and I think I have a short video of myself when I was five, when people ask me what do you want to do when you grow up, I said I want to be a scientist. That's what I want to do. I'm going to be focusing on that. I even at some point said I want to be a professor, focusing on that. And when I was 15, I was allowed to start studying at the university for my studies. I think one of the biggest things specifically in Israeli schools is all of those programs that you see right now allowing some students to go and study at the university in parallel in specific tracks. When I studied it, it was very abnormal. There was no way of both studying in school and university. You had to quit parts of school, then go here. It's now much more organized, much easier. You don't need your parents to drive in the middle of the day, drive you from one place to another. There's no specific task that you need to do. You just focus on what's important, which is education. I see my cousins right now, they're doing all of those amazing programs, going and studying about space. My cousin, for example, she won a program where her experiment is being sent to space to be studied. When we started doing this, we did not have those options. And I think what I remember the most from my junior high and high school is I want to study more, but I don't know from where. There wasn't a lot of information going online. There wasn't a lot of online in general. Encyclopedias can give you up to a certain value because sometimes learning from other people... I think the biggest thing that helped me is the fact that I had the possibility of going to the Technion and studying from the best, just seeing other people who know more things and saying I want to be like them. That would help me the most.
You shared with us that you grew up with three enormous female role models: your mother, your aunt, and your grandmother. How would you advise parents and teachers how to encourage their daughters, taking a gender perspective, and their female students who pursue learning at the highest levels of excellence as you did? What would you say to them?
I'll tell you through a story. When I was 21, I was at Microsoft Research here in the States. They called us to a conference and they talked about the glass ceiling. I asked the lady who was sitting next to me, what is a glass ceiling? She says, what do you mean? She's like, there's a cap to what you can do and it's almost invisible. It's like... I don't get it. I don't understand what you're saying. I couldn't even imagine what you told me. And I think that was very unique in my family. There were only women. I didn't know there were things that women are not supposed to do or can or cannot do. I studied karate since I was five. I'm a black belt. Why? Because I went to ballet lessons, I didn't like it, and I saw the other ones yelling and going barefoot. I wanted to do that. And my parents said, yeah, of course, go and do it. Nobody told me you're not supposed to do it because karate is not for women. When I wanted to study engineering, it was pretty clear. All my family are engineers, so I'm also doing that. I was afraid to go to the university. I said, oh, I don't know, now I'm 15, everybody else is older. And my mom said, no, older means it would be harder for them to study. You're much younger, it's much easier for you to study. I think the first time I started seeing some difference is when I went to the army. Even in my high school, in the computer science class, we were all women. We had only maybe two men. Most of them were just immigrants from the past USSR. And I don't know how that became, but it was just pretty clear that it was a very normal thing to do. When I came to the army, I think this is the first time I started seeing a difference. I came to a unit who was mostly doing cyber security, and I was the only woman there beyond the EA of the manager. And to be honest, it never bothered me. The only thing that bothered me is the fact that they had shared bathrooms. And that is part of the change that all of those units had to go through. There's more and more women coming in, but there's so many different changes that need to happen. And again, when I came to university, we had 40% women in our bachelor's in computer science. And the biggest changes started happening again when you become a professor. So for example, at the Technion, there's only three women out of 50 professors. And the reason is because you have to go abroad and study. Usually people get married. It's less common in our society for a man to follow his wife's dreams as opposed to the other one. And I think this is the biggest changes that we need to make. I never thought that my parents told me my husband needs to follow my dream. I don't know, I never thought there's something else that should happen. I knew I want to focus on science and this is where I went. I didn't know there was any societal punishments for doing what I think is right for me. And if you're asking what to do, just reduce all those barriers. Help them ignore what society is dictating, because you can grow in such a bubble.
We're talking to educators, and the toughest prediction for educators is how to prepare the younger generation for a future that is yet unknown. But you have an idea about where the world is heading. Your fields of expertise are the cutting edge areas of artificial intelligence, machine learning, and deep learning, and you actually design systems that predict the future. So had you had the opportunity to talk to educators who are designing education systems of today, what topics and skills do you think should be taught today so that the next generation would enter the job market probably in 2040, being as ready as possible?
