Introducing Michael

Good evening, ladies and gentlemen.

My name is Alex Bronstein. I am a professor in the Department of Computer Science at the Technion — Israel Institute of Technology, where I hold the Dan Broida Academic Chair and the Schmidt Chair in Artificial Intelligence, and head the Technion Center for Intelligent Systems. I am also a visiting professor at IST Austria, whose kind hospitality I am grateful for.

Tonight, it is my great pleasure to welcome my lifelong collaborator, colleague, partner, and accomplice — my brother, Michael Bronstein. Michael is a professor of Computer Science at the University of Oxford, where he holds the DeepMind Chair in AI. As you may have noticed, we are identical twins, and to answer the frequently asked question: yes, I am the older brother — by a whole ten minutes.

I could spend a great deal of time listing Michael’s numerous accolades, achievements, and contributions, but I’d rather spare you what might feel like a CV recital (and, honestly, I don’t remember them all anyway). Instead, I’d like to share some personal stories that you won’t find on Google – episodes that offer a glimpse into our shared journey that began long before any academic titles or professional honors.

My earliest memory of our collaboration dates back to kindergarten. Like many children, we found that institution rather confining. In search of an exit strategy, we quickly dismissed the most obvious plan — well, because it involved explosives. Our interest in chemistry would only emerge a decade later and, to our parents’ relief, it would end with the trade of all our homemade bombs and rockets for a fish tank. Our plan B was, however, somewhat more feasible: flooding the bloody place! With the help of our grandfather’s advice on flow and volume calculations, we set to work — and were immediately caught by a teacher in flagrante delicto. She caught us trying to cut a water pipe in the cellar with a toy saw. To her perplexed question “why?” – we honestly chanted in choir what seemed such an obvious answer: “to flood the kindergarten!”

Obviously we were all but discouraged by that incident, we just had to reroute our scientific adventures. We had our fascination with geology that led us to pester every adult we knew for specific types of rocks. And inspiration from science fiction stories about space travel and alien mutants made us perform our first experiments in biology. Admittedly, without Helsinki — we weren’t very strong in geography. Those experiments included attempts at suspended animation in insects — by putting them into the refrigerator. And we also tried to see if UV radiation could trigger some strange mutations in our bugs; my advice — don’t try this at home.

Throughout our childhood and adolescence, Michael and I pursued countless projects, from attempting to incubate chicken eggs without a chicken to subjecting various household items to our analytic methods. In the name of science, obviously! I believe that each of these experiments, whether successful or not, however laughable, characterizes very vividly Michael’s creativity and passion for discovery — a passion that evidently continues to this day.

Without further ado, it is my honor to introduce my brother, my partner in many adventures, and — some might say — my evil twin: Michael Bronstein.