The Most Important Thing

These days, the most important thing in the world to Orna Berry (‘PhDCS’86), high-tech entrepreneur, venture capitalist and former Chief Scientist of Israel, is a six-month old bundle of joy, her first grandchild Neta David.  But the road to grandmother bliss has been sprinkled with many important accomplishments, and the journey is by no means over.  

Berry was a pioneering female engineer in the field of computer science when she enrolled at USC in September 1980.  

“There were few women, but it was actually easier than it was in industry. I avoided paying attention to the issue and saved myself a lot of emotional pain,” she said.  “I was really happy at USC.  The friends I made at USC are still my friends today.  Most of us were foreign and we were like a virtual family.”

It was one of the many branches of the Trojan Family.  One her peers, Victor Vianu is now a professor of computer science at UC-San Diego.  Another, Serge Abiteboul, is a senior researcher at INRIA, the French National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Control. Still another is GÈrard Medioni, now chair of the USC Viterbi Department of Computer Science.

“We used to go hiking together and we went to the beach – all the usual Southern California things,” said Medioni.  “Orna and I lived in the same part of town and we carpooled together.”

Berry was born in Jerusalem about the time Israel became a nation.  She and Israel grew up together.  At 18, she was inducted into the military and served as an Air Force officer in the period immediately following the June, 1967 Six Day War.  This is a time known to Israelis as the War of Attrition.  She was responsible for scheduling ground training in the Air Force’s flying school and prepared the technical documents for the first American fighter aircraft – the F-4 Phantom and the A-4 Skyhawk – received by Israel’s Air Force.

“The world has learned that there is a big difference between democracy and Islamic fundamentalism.  This is not just a Middle East problem,” she said.  “It is a very difficult exercise, maybe impossible, to come to political agreements between democracies and dictatorships and we are pretty much at the center of this tension.”

After the military, Berry went to Haifa University and earned a bachelor degree in mathematics and statistics followed by Tel Aviv University where she earned a master’s degree in operations research.  When Berry came to United States, she was interested in medical mathematics.  When it came to computers, her main concern was keeping all of the punch cards in order rather than algorithms.  But the advent of terminals and keyboards changed that and lured her to computer science.

“I had a fellowship and worked at Rand and, later, at SDC,” she said describing her studies as a USC computer science doctoral student in the early 1980s.  This was the period when the Internet, then known as Arpanet, was emerging. “My PhD relied on the Arpanet heavily.  I was doing experimental work that involved a few hundred CPU hours – that’s hours, not seconds – across the Arpanet on 11 CPUs spread in the US and Canada.”

When she left USC, Berry’s career began to take off.  She spent 18 months at SDC, a company that later became Unisys.  Next she returned to Israel where she was a researcher for IBM.  Then she became the chief scientist – a position known today as chief technical officer – for Fibronics where her design and implementation work became international standards (IEEE 802.1 and 802.5).

“I had the good fortune to move from distributed computing into networking at a time that it was moving into the commercial market,” she said.  “In 1993, I co-founded my own company, ORNET Data Communication Technologies.  We developed a very high performance local area network switch.  It increased traffic in a local area network fifty fold.”

ORNET was eventually acquired by Siemens and after Berry fulfilled her commitment to stay for a year, she became Chief Scientist for Israel in the Ministry of Industry and Trade.  She was the first and is still the only woman to have held that post.  The job, which was to encourage industrial research and development, was a professional rather than a political position and she controlled an annual budget of half a billion dollars.

“Israel has no natural resources,” she explained.  “Turning our educational infrastructure, our problem-solving skills, into economic leverage is a major mission.  It puts value on our education and boosts the economy.”

As Israel’s Chief Scientist, Berry chaired a half dozen large bi-lateral and multi-lateral industrial research and development funds.  One of these is BIRDF (the Bi-national Industrial Research and Development Fund), which was established to stimulate collaborations between Israel and the U.S.

“It puts small Israeli companies together with large U.S. companies that have market access in the U.S.,” she said.  BIRDF has an endowment of $110 million. Its interest and royalties from successful projects have generated to collaborating companies from the US and Israel revenues of $7.5 billion with three-quarters of that going to the U.S. and one-quarter to Israel.  “That’s good.  The Israeli economy has benefited a great deal and U.S. financial markets are now looking at Israel.”

Berry was a member of a task force organized by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) that issued a recent study, Globalization and Offshoring of Software.  The study found that despite intensifying competition, offshoring between developed and developing countries can benefit both parties. “Technology collaborations and investments among different nations produce a climate of innovation leading to new jobs, particularly high value jobs, that benefit all parties.”  Berry led the industrial track in the ACM task force.

Sequoia Capital, one of the Silicon Valley’s most well-known venture capital firms, in which USC Trustee and Viterbi School Board of Councilor member Mark Stevens is a senior partner, has an office in Israel.  Berry, in fact, has communicated with both Stevens and Andrew Viterbi, who named the Viterbi School.  She counts Benny Hanigal and Shmil Levy, two of the three Sequoia partners in Israel, as close allies.  

She continues to work to develop new areas in high-tech research and development in Israel’s science and technology industries.  She sits on the Israel National Research Advisory Board, the European Union Research Advisory Board and in 2000, she joined Gemini Israel Funds as its first Venture Partner.

“When I was an entrepreneur, Gemini was my main investor,” she said.  “Today I’m chairing two young companies that I’m really excited about.”

One of those companies is Adamind, with which Medioni has also had contact.  Adamind is working on a system for transcoding images and content between handheld devices.  The other company is Prime Sense, which is working on a device to replace mouse, keyboard and joystick inputs into a computer or other systems.

“Actually, it is quite similar to some work being done at the GamePipe Laboratory at USC,” she said.  “USC has evolved a great deal and there are a lot of interesting things being done there.”

Berry has three children. Her two oldest, a son who studies at Insead in France, and a daughter, who is a patent translator, whose husband builds atom chips at Ben Gurion University, are both married.   Her older daughter is the mother of her first grandchild.  Her youngest daughter, who is 16, is a budding photographer who has won prizes and is studying in a special science program.

“We like to go biking, or go to the desert and watch meteorite showers, or to see the flowers in Gallilee,” she said.  And would she consider sending her daughter to study at USC.

“Oh yes, absolutely!”