The Node - Vol. 01, January 2023

THE NODE

mbzuai.ac.ae

TAKING THE FIGHT TO MALARIA AND CLIMATE CHANGE

The university joins a consortium of leading health and tech organizations working to eliminate malaria

GLOBAL AI LEADERS ATTRACTED TO ABU DHABI

MBZUAI President Eric Xing is building a team of world-class faculty

EMPLOYERS RECOGNIZE STUDENT INNOVATIONS

Students are developing solutions for speech recognition systems, road safety, and energy efficiency, and employers are taking notice

WELCOME

to the first edition of The Node, a magazine dedicated to highlighting how the university is delivering on the needs of the nation for AI talent development, research, and innovation.

As this issue goes to print in December 2022, the university is on the eve of holding its inaugural commencement ceremony — a moment of reflection on the institution’s progress and aspirations. Read about (page 7) how AI is already being pressed into service helping Malaria No More and the Crown Prince Court take the fight to climate change and malaria.

On page 10, read about this year’s AI Quorum, an elite forum for global AI experts to thrash out the future of AI research and innovation. The university is fast becoming a magnet for top global AI scientists and, in this issue, you will meet a few of the world-class faculty, who are helping to enhance the university’s research, R&D capabilities, connections to global science, prestige, and capacity for talent development (page 13).

In early 2023, MBZUAI’s first cohort - the Class

of 2022 - will officially receive their conferral of degrees. These exceptional graduates reflect the university’s commitment to realizing the vision of H.H. Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, President of the UAE, to strengthen people’s capabilities in science and technology for the benefit of the economy and society.

On page 21, you’ll find examples of how our students are using AI to tackle real-world challenges, and how employers from the public and private sectors are sitting up and taking notice. We also feature some of the MBZUAI students who have published this year in top global academic conferences such as MICCAI, NeurIPS, and more (page 23).

Finally, in keeping with our commitment to developing the nation’s workforce, hundreds of leaders from across the UAE’s public and private sectors have taken part in executive training at MBZUAI. On page 20 read about how the MBZUAI Executive Program saw CEOs, directors general, ambassadors and others complete a 12-week program of coursework, lectures, collaborations and field visits to help them unlock the potential benefits of AI for their organizations.

MBZUAI’s campus is located in Masdar City, a pioneering enclave of Abu Dhabi, dedicated to sustainability and a hub for research and development. City planners are spearheading innovations to realize greener, more sustainable urban living, as evidenced in our labs and classrooms shown here. File photo.

MBZUAI BY THE NUMBERS

Top 25

globally for AI, computer vision, machine learning and NLP according to CSRankings*

4:1

student:faculty ratio

THE GRADUATING CLASS OF 2022

*Top-ranked computer science institution in the Arab world, and in the Middle East and Africa; ahead of renowned research universities including: University of Michigan, Imperial College London, the University of Tokyo and the University of Sydney

STUDENTS

4958%

research faculty from universities including Oxford, Carnegie Mellon, and Stanford

of faculty from top-100 institutions globally

202 81%

Students

31% Female

19%

FACULTY AND STUDENT PUBLISHING

6 European Conference of Computer Vision

27 36th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems

31 34th annual Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition

Expats Emirati

TAKING THE FIGHT TO MALARIA AND CLIMATE CHANGE

MBZUAI joins a consortium of leading health and technology organizations working to prevent the effects of climate change from hindering progress toward eliminating malaria

While the mosquito may just be a pest in some parts of the world, it is a leading cause of death in others, such as in sub-Saharan Africa. Infected mosquitoes spread the deadly disease, incapacitating people and perpetuating a cycle of poverty in families and communities.

Due to changes in the climate, malaria may no longer be primarily confined to hot and humid regions close to the equator, and malaria-carrying mosquitoes could spread to new regions – and into new seasons – as temperatures rise and rainfall patterns shift. By forecasting such changes, MBZUAI’s experts in AI can play an important role in addressing the problem.

Malaria may not be a problem in Abu Dhabi, the UAE or the wider region, yet the Crown Prince Court of Abu Dhabi (CPC) sees it as a high priority worth tackling on behalf of afflicted communities.

Malaria accounts for around half of the preventable days that African children miss school, and it claimed an estimated 627,000 lives in 2020, according to World Health Organization figures. In November 2022 the CPC announced a three-year, $5m award from its Reaching the Last Mile initiative to the US-based non-profit Malaria No More.

Reaching the Last Mile is a portfolio of global health programs aimed at eliminating disease that is driven by

the personal commitment of Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed al Nahyan. The program partnered with Malaria No More to create a climate- and healthrelated initiative called Forecasting Healthy Futures (FHF). This initiative seeks to drive innovation and investment in global health solutions amid climate change, starting with mosquito-borne diseases such as malaria. A team of experts at MBZUAI has been called in to help the CPC and its partners leverage AI to tackle the problem.

The recent donation to Malaria No More is the CPC’s second following an initial $1.5m award in 2020. That grant was made to assess the feasibility of antimalaria strategies based on climate studies, with the findings encouraging enough to lead to this next step. FHF also receives funding from the Tableau Foundation and IBM’s The Weather Company, among others.

Eradicating malaria would be transformational for millions of people. Malariafree countries typically see their economies grow five times faster, and a 10% decrease in malaria has been associated with a 0.3% increase in GDP. For philanthropists and funders such as the CPC, money spent on combatting the disease is money well spent, as every dollar invested in malaria prevention in Africa results in $40 of economic growth.

The second phase of the program follows FHF’s establishment of the Institute for Malaria and Climate Solutions (IMACS), which was announced in partnership with the CPC during Abu Dhabi Sustainability Week in January 2022. “We’re anxious to find opportunities to put our expertise to use in improving health outcomes worldwide, and in particular through collaboration with IMACS in pursuit of malaria elimination,” said MBZUAI Research Engagement Director Dr. Hosni Ghedira.

IMACS plans to rely on MBZUAI for operations it recently launched in Indonesia, according to the November 2022 announcement of the CPC’s $5m award. The specific objectives include expanding the network of experts who can help develop sophisticated early warning systems, as well as demonstrating how data-enabled AI can help develop response systems to malaria and other climate-sensitive infectious diseases. “By applying AI and new sources of weather and environmental data, IMACS can restore predictability to disease patterns in the midst of the dangerous volatility caused by global warming and related change,” said Director of IMACS Dr. Kaushik Sarkar.

CLAIMED AN ESTIMATED 627,000 LIVES IN 2020, ACCORDING TO WHO FIGURES

A health worker sprays insecticide to help stop the breeding of mosquitoes. Stock image.

The CPC’s anti-malaria campaign is not the only instance in which MBZUAI faculty, researchers or students have helped the UAE advance towards its national goals:

• The university is developing algorithms with the Abu Dhabi Health Services Company (SEHA) to predict when medical patients may suffer heart attacks. SEHA owns and operates Sheikh Shakhbout Medical City, one of the UAE’s largest hospitals that was built as part of the Abu Dhabi Economic Vision 2030 program to improve health care services in the emirate.

• MBZUAI is providing professional training programs to industry leaders in the country in collaboration with the Ministry of Industry and Advanced Technology, such as the four-day program held in June 2022. Attendees learned about the technical knowledge needed to leverage AI to help determine the best Fourth Industrial Revolution strategies for their respective organizations.

• MBZUAI students created an algorithm to lower waste and boost efficiency on farms as part of the Abu Dhabi Agriculture and Food Security

Authority’s Agritech Hackathon in November 2021. Mugariya Farooq and Sarah Al Barri, who focus on machine learning, finished second in the competition by designing a system using drones to take pictures of crops, as well as by creating an algorithm to analyze those pictures to prevent disease and predict yields.

• More than 60 students from 21 universities in the UAE participated in the 2022 Transport Hackathon held by the Dubai Roads and Transport Authority (RTA) from January 31 to February 1, 2022, with the first and second-place teams coming from MBZUAI. Students were asked to address six current public transport challenges identified by the RTA. The winning team sought to improve public safety for scooter riders with an app, Scooty, that monitors adherence to the rules scooter drivers must follow, including wearing a helmet and observing speed limits. The second-place team created an app, Salem, to address traffic safety and compliance by motorcycle delivery drivers, who occupy an increasingly prominent place on the emirate’s road network.

(Above) MBZUAI President, University Professor Eric Xing addresses AI Quorum Retreat attendees. (Below) MBZUAI Laureate Professor Michael I. Jordan delivers opening remarks during the first AI Quorum Workshop on collaborative learning.

MINING DEEP INSIGHTS AT THE AI QUORUM

MBZUAI’s AI Quorum brings together some of the world’s leading researchers for strategic discussion and collaboration

The global AI community is filled with brilliant minds. Nevertheless, even if every one of these individuals worked tirelessly in pursuit of their vision and had unlimited access to funding and specialized equipment, AI would never reach its full potential without knowledge-sharing and collaboration. With this in mind, MBZUAI launched the AI Quorum in October 2022 to bring together some of the world’s leading AI researchers in a series of hybrid events in and around the university’s campus.

The Quorum is designed to offer a high-level setting for strategic discussion and collaboration. “It’s an oasis away from the daily research traffic of work and large conferences,” said MBZUAI President Eric Xing. “AI is often split into niche discussions, so this is an opportunity to look at AI in a contextualized and intentional fashion.”

faculty member and MBZUAI Laureate Professor Michael Jordan, one of the world’s leading computer scientists. Jordan, along with around 20 global experts, discussed the challenges of collaborative learning – wherein data is fed into a central computer system via mobile devices, hospitals, and various edge devices, to build a large model through machine learning. While the potential is immense, it is at events like the AI Quorum that scientists come together to discuss how to mitigate risks, such as the input of invalid or false data.

“THE DECISION TO FOUND MBZUAI IS ONE AMONG SO MANY GREAT, LONGTERM DECISIONS. AS AN INVESTMENT IN AI, MBZUAI IS ONE STEP ALONG A JOURNEY THAT BEGAN BEFORE THE FOUNDING OF THE COUNTRY,”

The first three of six planned workshops took place from October to December of 2022, with the remaining three scheduled for the early months of 2023. The workshops are intended to help orient research towards impact while advancing the goals of the UAE National Strategy for AI 2031. The AI Quorum also featured a highlevel retreat in 2022, which aims to advise the university, and the nation, on vital AI research, innovation, and talent development opportunities.

The first workshop on October 8 and 9, 2022, was led by U.C. Berkeley

Another concern is the growing gap between new algorithms on the one hand for theoretical investigation, and real-world applications on the other. One of the workshop’s goals was to bring together experts from both sides to help shape the research agenda.

The second workshop of the AI Quorum was the CASL and AI Operating Systems Workshop from October 13 to 15, 2022. Participants from academia and industry engaged with the concept of AI at scale, which involves developing use cases for AI that were previously thought to be impossible, such as art, software programming and pharmaceutical design.

The first day of included Associate Professor Kun Zhang, Professor Timothy Baldwin and Assistant Professor Samuel Horvath. The second day was open to the public to establish greater links with industry. Assistant Professor Qirong Ho, led

discussion on the importance of industry links. Although dozens of startups are working to train large models, the funding and resources required might best found in industry partnerships.

To complement the workshop format, AI Quorum founder, MBZUAI President Eric Xing, held a three-day retreat in November 2022, for a small group of elite AI scientists. The retreat was held to more deeply explore the future directions of AI, and how researchers might best serve institutional needs through targeted research, as well as those of humanity.

Retreat attendees counted among them four MBZUAI faculty members, as well as Turing Award laureate Raj Reddy, MBZUAI Board Member Sir Michael Brady, and MBZUAI Vice President Sultan Al Hajji. Attendees took part in intensive roundtable discussions, and even enjoyed a presentation on the history of the UAE from H.E. Zaki Nusseibeh

The third and final session of 2022, Natural Language Processing (NLP), was led by Baldwin in December 2022, proximate to the EMNLP global conference, in Abu Dhabi.

The AI Quorum will see additional workshops in 2023 beginning with robotics in January as well as a workshop on explainable AI in February. To learn more visit: mbzuai.ac.ae/the-ai-quorum/

AI Quorum Retreat participants learned about the history of the UAE with H.E. Zaki Nusseibeh (center).

H.E. ZAKI NUSSEIBEH

CELEBRATING OUR GRADUATES

The university began celebrations for its inaugural commencement on December 14, 2022 on the university’s Abu Dhabi campus, with a precommencement gowning walk. The first graduating class consists of 52 students from 24 countries, with graduates earning master’s degrees in computer vision and machine learning.

Commencement is a major milestone for the university, which was officially licensed in March 2020 by the Commission for Academic Accreditation (CAA) of the Ministry of Education in the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

The Class of 2022 has thrived under the guidance of the university’s faculty, which consists of 49 renowned AI experts led by Eric Xing, President and University Professor. In total, the university boasts more than 200 master’s and Ph.D. students from more than 40 countries — the Emirates being the single largest student population.

In 2022 alone, students and faculty produced over 350 scholarly publications in top conferences and journals. Class of 2022 students demonstrated their aptitude throughout the duration of the program, with many winning a string of first place honors including in the Cisco Sustainability Challenge, Siemens Women in AI Hackathon, the RTA Smart Mobility Hackathon in Expo Dubai, and Dubai Roads and Transport Authority’s (RTA) Transport Hackathon.

In keeping with the university’s commitment to supporting women in technology, 18 of this year’s graduates — 35% of the graduating class — are female. These graduates are set to become innovators and future leaders in the UAE and beyond, including eight women who will go on to pursue a Ph.D.

CONGRATULATIONS CLASS OF 2022!

(Left) MBZUAI students try on their gowns in preparation for the inaugural commencement on January 30, 2023. (Above) MBZUAI students walk on the university’s Masdar City campus after trying on their commencement gowns.

GLOBAL AI LEADERS ATTRACTED TO ABU DHABI

MBZUAI President Eric Xing is assembling a high-powered team of world-class AI faculty

Excellence in artificial intelligence starts with building a world-class faculty that is able to develop talented students, as well as to train and enlighten executives and existing thought leaders from the UAE’s business ecosystem and public sector. Helping to meet national ambitions to become a leader in AI and to enhance the science-based prestige of the country will require research and innovation by talented people, and an ability to partner with others on innovative projects – understanding challenges and opportunities, as well as collaborating on solutions.

There are currently 45 members of the faculty – 18 of whom arrived in 2022, increasing the faculty size by 42% in one year. Indeed, a total of 34 faculty have been added since 2021, an 80% rise. The new arrivals are helping to enhance the university’s rankings, prestige, and capacity for innovation, research and talent development.

Fakhreddine Karray served as university provost from August 2021 to December 2022, and became a fulltime member of the research faculty in January 2023. Karray previously worked at the University of Waterloo in Canada, where his roles included founding the Centre for Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence and the Waterloo AI Institute, as well as holding the Loblaws Research Chair in AI. Karray is a Fellow at the Canadian Academy of Engineering, Engineering

Institute of Canada, and Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.

Karray’s research interests include operational AI, cognitive machines, natural human-machine interaction, and autonomous and intelligent systems. These can be used for technologies such as self-aware machines, intelligent transportation systems and predictive analytics for managing supply chains.

Agathe Guilloux joined the faculty as a Professor of Statistics. She comes to MBZUAI from Evry Paris Saclay University in France, where she headed the mathematics laboratory – a team of 45 faculty and staff, and 15 post-doctoral students and Ph.D. students. Previously, she was an Associate Professor at Sorbonne University and she holds a Ph.D. from Université de Rennes I in Rennes, France.

Timothy Baldwin was appointed as Acting Provost in January 2023. He joined the university as Associate Provost for Academic and Student Affairs in March 2022 and continues to serve as Acting Department Chair for MBZUAI’s Natural Language Processing (NLP) Department.

A TOTAL OF 34 FACULTY HAVE BEEN ADDED

Baldwin previously spent 17 years at the University of Melbourne in Australia, where he served as Melbourne Laureate Professor and as Director of the ARC Training Centre in Cognitive Computing for Medical Technologies, among other leadership roles. Baldwin has held visiting positions at Cambridge University, the University of Washington, the University of Tokyo and Germany’s Saarland University.

Guilloux’s research interests include applying statistical learning to health care. One element of her work is designing algorithms to solve the problems physicians and researchers confront in personalized medicine. In this process, she uses electronic health records and observational data from field visits to propose prediction models in clinical settings.

Baldwin’s research interests at NLP include deep learning, algorithmic fairness, computational social science and social media analytics. These technologies are crucial for virtual assistants such as Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa, as well as for chatbots and digital translation tools. Baldwin’s primary focus will be on developing a world-class NLP team to improve the underlying technologies.

MBZUAI and the UAE expect Baldwin to play a key role in helping to integrate next-generation AI and

University Professor Eric Xing.

leverage NLP for a more equitable world.

Hanan Al Darmaki joined the MBZUAI faculty as Assistant Professor of NLP in August 2022 and she will be a member of Baldwin’s NLP Department. Al Darmaki plans to focus on improving automated speech recognition for languages that currently lack sufficient data to train computational models to offer accurate speech recognition.

Arabic is one of the languages facing this challenge due to the wide range of spoken dialects, which tend to diverge considerably from the standard written form. Al Darmaki hopes to address this with a technique called unsupervised speech recognition, which seeks to use spoken language rather than written text, identifying words that commonly appear close together in sentences.

Science and Software Engineering

Department. She has also worked in several public sector roles, including as an analyst at Statistics CentreAbu Dhabi and a network engineer for the Dubai Electricity and Water Authority.

Abdulmutaleb El Saddik joined the faculty in 2021 as Acting Department Chair of Computer Vision and Professor of Computer Vision.

HELPING TO MEET NATIONAL AMBITIONS TO BECOME A LEADER IN AI AND TO ENHANCE THE SCIENCE-BASED PRESTIGE OF THE COUNTRY WILL REQUIRE RESEARCH AND INNOVATION BY TALENTED PEOPLE

He comes to MBZUAI from the University of Ottawa in Canada, where he served as a distinguished university professor and University Research Chair in the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. El Saddik’s academic accolades include fellowships in the Royal Society of Canada, the Canadian Academy of Engineering, the Engineering Institute of Canada, and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.

real world are digitally replicated at the greatest level of detail possible, with their states mirrored in real time. El Saddik is recognised as a global expert in the field, which does not rely on any single technology. Rather, it combines many prominent themes, including AI, blockchain, edge computing, big data, virtual reality and the internet of things.

Other new arrivals to MBZUAI’s fast-growing faculty include Hao Li, Associate Professor of Computer Vision and Director of the Metaverse Lab; Kun Zhang, Deputy Department Chair and Associate Professor of Machine Learning, and Director of the Centre for Integrative AI; and Muhammad Abdul-Mageed Associate Professor of natural language processing.

In 2022, MBZUAI welcomed five new adjunct faculty members including Shahrukh Hashmi, Eran Segal, Eric Moulines, Peter Richtárik and Hava Siegelmann.

Al Darmaki came to MBZUAI from UAE University, where she was an Assistant Professor at the Computer

At MBZUAI El Saddik has helped to develop digital twin technology, a precise form of computer simulation wherein objects or systems in the

2022 Also saw the university welcome four new visiting faculty members including Gus Xia , Xiaodan Liang, Bhiksha Ramakrishnan and Tongliang Liu .

Professor of Computer Vision Abdulmotaleb El Saddik Professor of Statistics Agathe Guilloux

Professor of Machine Learning Fakhreddine Karray

Professor of Natural Language Processing Timothy Baldwin

Assistant Professor of Natural Language Processing Hanan Al Darmaki

Associate Professor of Machine Learning Kun Zhang

MBZUAI FACULTY LEAD GLOBAL CONFERENCES

MBZUAI faculty led an impressive number of global AI conferences in 2022 — yet another testament to the caliber of faculty.

recommendations to help develop NLP technologies globally.

• With co-authors from the University of Melbourne, an analysis of procedural texts, such as recipes and chemical patents, and how such texts can be translated into structured workflows.

analysis.

With MBZUAI’s global ranking for its core AI disciplines having risen into the top 25 in areas of focus, it is no surprise that faculty members took on prominent leadership roles at global conferences and gatherings in 2022. Members led and chaired key conferences, served as area chairs and submitted papers that won formal recognition, collaborating with peers worldwide in the process. MBZUAI also helped host international events that boosted its profile in the international AI community.

Timothy Baldwin, Associate Provost for Academic and Student Affairs and Acting Department Chair of the MBZUAI NLP Department, delivered the presidential address at the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) conference held in Dublin, Ireland in May 2022. Baldwin is the president of the association and had three papers published by the ACL:

• A new approach to evaluating how successfully a document can summarize a series of medical files. The long-term goal is to reduce the human effort required to review medical paperwork.

• The challenge of digitally preserving and developing language technologies for more than 700 indigenous languages spoken in Indonesia. Based on this research, which was conducted in collaboration with 11 other people worldwide, the authors offer

Le Song, Department Chair and Professor of Machine Learning, was a program chair at the 39th International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) held in the US in Baltimore, Maryland in July 2022. His two other program co-chairs were Csaba Szepesvari of DeepMind and the University of Alberta, and Stefanie Jegelka of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Song’s leadership position was complemented at the conference by other MBZUAI faculty members, researchers and students, who had a total of seven papers accepted.

Zhang was also recognized at the ICML event co-chaired by Song. A paper he had co-authored and submitted to the conference in 2012, “On causal and anti-causal learning”, was awarded a Test of Time Award Honorable Mention at the 2022 conference. Considered slightly controversial 10 years ago, the paper has since earned recognition as a foundational text in the global machinelearning community.

MBZUAI RESEARCHERS

COLLABORATED WITH 57 INSTITUTIONS FROM 16 COUNTRIES ACROSS FIVE CONTINENTS FOR CVPR 2022

Associate Professor Kun Zhang of MBZUAI’s Machine Learning Department served as co-chair of two conferences in 2022: the 38th Conference on Uncertainty in AI held in August in Eindhoven, the Netherlands; and the Conference on Causal Learning and Reasoning held in April in Eureka, California. Zhang, who is also an associate professor at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, focuses on methods for automated causal discovery from various forms of data, as well as exploring learning problems from a causal perspective and the philosophical foundations of machine-learning tasks. His interests for the application of such research include neuroscience, computer vision, computational finance and climate

Professor Preslav Nakov, Acting Deputy Department Chair in the MBZUAI NLP Department, was a program committee chair for the ACL conference chaired by Baldwin, as well as a senior area chair for two additional conferences: the 29th International Conference on Computational Logistics held in Gyeongju, South Korea in October 2022; and the Second Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics held online in November 2022. Nakov was also a workshop cochair for the World Wide Web conference held in Lyon, France in April 2022, at which MBZUAI Adjunct Professor Mérouane Debbah was a keynote speaker.

Professor Abdulmotaleb El Saddik, Acting Department Chair of the MBZUAI Computer Vision Department, stands out as another faculty member recognized with multiple chair positions in 2022.

El Saddik was general co-chair of the 2022 Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)

MBZUAI Professor and ACL President Timothy Baldwin delivers a keynote at the 60th annual meeting of the ACL in Dublin, Ireland. Photo courtesy of ACL.

International Conference on Computational Intelligence and Virtual Environments for Measurement Systems and Applications in June in Chemnitz, Germany. He also served in the same role at the 2022 IEEE International Conference on Digital Twins in December in Haikou, China. In August 2022 he served as the technical co-chair of the online IEEE International Conference on Multimedia Information Processing.

MBZUAI faculty as a group also stood out at the 36th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems in New Orleans, Louisiana in November 2022.

A total of 27 papers were accepted, with 12 faculty members or university researchers as the author or coauthor of at least one paper.

Professor of Computer Vision Salman Khan, Deputy Department Chair of Computer Vision and Associate Professor of Computer Vision Fahad Khan, Assistant Professor of Computer Vision Rao Muhammad Anwer and Assistant Professor of Computer Learning Muhammad Haris Khan. A paper by MBZUAI research scientists Dayan Guan and Guangyi Chen was also accepted.

MBZUAI faculty members and students also presented 31 papers, including six oral presentations, at the 34th Annual Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, organized by IEEE and the Computer Vision Foundation in June 2022 in New Orleans.

MBZUAI FACULTY LED AND CHAIRED KEY CONFERENCES, SERVED AS AREA CHAIRS AND SUBMITTED PAPERS THAT WON FORMAL RECOGNITION, COLLABORATING WITH PEERS WORLDWIDE IN THE PROCESS.

Submissions were led by Zhang, who had 10 papers accepted. Others who had their papers accepted include Song, MBZUAI President Eric Xing, Associate Professor of Machine Learning Martin Takáč, Assistant Professors of Machine Learning Bin Gu, Qirong Ho and Huan Xiong, Adjunct Professor of Machine Learning Pengtao Xie, Associate

Seven faculty members featured in more than one paper alongside co-authors, including Khan (nine papers) and Adjunct Associate Professor of Computer Vision Shijian Lu (eight papers). The international authorship of these papers underscores MBZUAI’s integration with the global research community, as researchers from the Abu Dhabi institution collaborated with 57 other institutions

from the public and private sector from 16 countries across five continents, with institutions in China, the US, Australia and South Korea leading the way.

To round out 2022, MBZUAI collaborated with New York University Abu Dhabi (NYUAD) to host the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in NLP (EMNLP) from December 7 to 11, held in person at the Abu Dhabi National Exhibition Center and also online. The Abu Dhabi Convention and Exhibition Bureau also played a supporting role.

President Xing and Nizar Habash, NYUAD Professor and Program Head of Computer Science, both served as cochairs of the local organizing committee. EMNLP 2022 featured six tutorials and 22 workshops, including the Seventh Workshop on Arabic Natural Language Processing, the 13th International Workshop on Health Text Mining and Information Analysis, and the Fourth Workshop on Financial Technology and Natural Language Processing.

EMNLP is one of the two leading conferences on NLP research – along with ACL, at which Baldwin played a leading role. The December conference was sponsored by technology multinationals, including Amazon, Apple, Baidu, Google, Meta and Microsoft.

Timothy Baldwin delivers a keynote at the 60th annual meeting of the ACL in Dublin, Ireland. Photo courtesy of ACL.

THE METAVERSE (LAB) IS OPEN FOR BUSINESS

Dr Hao Li, Associate Professor of Computer Vision (right), has been hard at work building the new Metaverse Lab. This new research center is at the heart of the university’s focus to integrate computer vision, graphics, and machine learning.

(Top) MBZUAI President and University Professor Eric Xing and MBZUAI Laureate Professor Michael I. Jordan take part in a Q&A with Executive Program participants during a site visit to Injazat. (Bottom) Executive Program participants visit the award-winning ADNOC Panorama Digital Command Center.

UNPARALLELED EXECUTIVE TRAINING

MBZUAI is preparing a generation of UAE leadership for AI with unique, powerful executive training

In March 2022 MBZUAI held a graduation ceremony, but not for its master’s and doctoral students. The event instead feted the first 41 professionals from across the UAE’s public and private sector leadership to have completed the inaugural MBZUAI Executive Program (MEP). The CEOs, director generals, ambassadors and others completed a 12-week program of coursework, lectures, collaborations and field visits to help them unlock the potential benefits of AI for their organizations.

As the participants soaked up new knowledge and ideas, the university was able to forge meaningful connections between the public and private sectors and help the UAE advance towards its objective of becoming a globally recognized center for AI.

Such technologies could comprise almost 14% of the country’s GDP by 2030, according to an analysis by PwC. MBZUAI’s role in helping the UAE achieve this is threefold: research, innovation and talent development. With respect to the third category, along with educating master’s and doctoral students, the Abu Dhabi institution also trains professionals. The Executive Program is a high-profile example.

“Congratulations to all the graduates on this special milestone,” said His Excellency Dr. Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber, the UAE Minister of Industry and Advanced Technology, and Chairman of MBZUAI’s Board of Trustees. “The skills and knowledge they have gained will enable them to incorporate innovative AI solutions within their organizations, enhancing their performance and competitiveness.”

The Executive Program comprises six

courses delivered by instructors from leading universities, including MBZUAI, Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the University of California, Berkeley.

David Parkes, a Harvard professor and global leader in fields such as bounded rationality, machine-learning decisions and game theory, led a session detailing how AI and machine learning are connected to the economy. Yoav Shoham, a professor of computer science at Stanford University, presented on lingual cognition and intelligence, while Raj Reddy, a former winner of the Turing Award – the Nobel Prize of Computing – and a professor of computer science and robotics at Carnegie Mellon University, shared his expertise from fields such as humancomputer interaction, technology in the service of society and digital democracy.

Other leading academics who contributed their expertise to the Executive Program included Eric Xing, MBZUAI President and University Professor, and Michael Jordan, the university’s Laureate Professor and the Honorary Director of the Laureate Faculty Program. The roster also included Daniela Rus, Director of MIT’s Computer Science and AI Laboratory; and Tom Mitchell, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University.

AI technologies as the firm grew into the largest designated market maker on the New York Stock Exchange in October 2020.

PLATFORMS LIKE THE MBZUAI EXECUTIVE PROGRAM ARE IMPERATIVE TO EXPANDING THE AI CAPABILITIES OF INDIVIDUALS AND ENTIRE ORGANIZATIONS.”

Another notable name was Dr. KaiFu Lee, the Chairman and CEO of Sinovation Ventures. Lee, a former Google executive, founded the venture capital firm, which focuses on developing the next generation of China’s high-technology companies. In addition to the guest lecturers, program participants visited corporations and institutions in person to see the value of AI in action, including the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company, the Emirates Post Group, the Injazat/G42 joint venture, the Dubai International Financial Center FinTech Hive, the Federal Competitiveness and Statistics Center, and the Al Ain Zoo and Aquarium.

H.E. DR. MOHAMED AL KUWAITI, DIRECTOR, NATIONAL DATA CENTER AND MEP ALUMNUS

For their collaborative projects, the participants developed potential solutions to corporate and global policy challenges.

In addition to academics, guest lecturers included private-sector leaders such as Citadel Securities CEO Dr. Peng Zhao, who helped leverage

Two additional MEP cohorts have gone through the program as of December 2022, bringing the total number of participants to more than 120. To learn more about the MBZUAI Executive Program visit:

mbzuai.ac.ae/training_program/ executive-program/

Vice President for Public Affairs and Alumni Relations Sultan Al Hajji. File photo.

EMPLOYERS RECOGNIZE STUDENT INNOVATIONS

MBZUAI students are providing solutions to everything from speech recognition systems to road safety and energy efficiency

An impressive number of student teams from MBZUAI have been representing the university at recent international competitions and conferences – and major national and multinational organizations are taking notice. In September, 2022, MBZUAI hosted its first in-person, Opportunities Fair, and 38 employers from various industries and sectors were in attendance, keen to connect with students and enable them to explore potential careers in AI, and internship opportunities.

Companies such as Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC), Mubadala Investment Company (Mubadala), DP World, Du Telecom, Etisalat, G42, Hewlett Packard, McKinsey & Company, Careem, and more, took part in an exhibition and set of activities designed to most effectively connect with the university’s AI graduate talent. Meanwhile, LinkedIn, Michael Page, and First Abu Dhabi Bank (FAB) ran short workshops on personal branding, understanding the UAE job market, and career development.

One of the student ventures that really put MBZUAI on the radar of these major companies was presented in October 2021 at Dubai’s annual GITEX of global technology enterprises, thought leaders, start-ups and other innovators. Akbobek Abilkaiyrkyzy, Ahmed Al-Mahrooqi and Gokul Karthic are working to expand the capabilities

of audio-visual dubbing from one language to another, using deep learning, NLP and computer vision.

To do so, the team has devised a threestep process, the first step being to generate subtitles in a language selected by the user. This is followed by the generation of an audio version of the text before the audio is finally synchronized with the speaker’s lip movements on screen. The result is greater accuracy in translation and lip-synching for products like educational videos and even movies.

Abilkaiyrkyzy

is also part of a quartet of MBZUAI master’s students that won the Cisco Sustainability Challenge at Expo 2020 Dubai in March 2022. Her team was one of four from MBZUAI to reach the final round of the competition. Along with Nicolás Cuadrado, Shahad Hardan and Alejandro Gutiérrez, Abilkaiyrkyzy was awarded the opportunity to take part in a six-month mentorship program with Cisco’s technology experts. This mentorship will help her team improve their skills, as well as guide them in developing their winning project, Energy for the People, into a final product or start-up venture.

The goal of Energy for the People is to improve the balance in the UAE’s energy grid by using data generated by residential energy consumers. The project would allow people to cut greenhouse gas emissions by

using an AI-based rewards system that incentivizes the efficient use of electricity.

A scaled-up and successful version could be a promising solution for the UAE and the Gulf, considering the energy required to air condition buildings, a process that a Strategy& analysis from 2015 estimated accounted for some 70% of the region’s peak electricity load. A system to ease that load would contribute to the achievement of global carbon reduction goals and the UAE’s national climate change targets, which include the country’s Energy Strategy 2050 target of reducing its carbon footprint from power generation by 70% by 2050.

MBZUAI students were also front and center at the 2022 Transport Hackathon organized by the Dubai Roads and Transport Authority (RTA). More than 60 students from 21 UAE universities were tasked with addressing six public transport challenges identified by the RTA. The winning team, comprising 10 MBZUAI students, sought to improve public safety for scooter riders via an app called Scooty.

MBZUAI students gather in a park close to campus to discuss research. File photo.

A QUARTET OF MBZUAI MASTER’S STUDENTS WON THE CISCO SUSTAINABILITY CHALLENGE AT EXPO 2020 DUBAI

The team’s app monitors adherence to the traffic rules that scooter riders are obliged to follow, including wearing a helmet and not going faster than the posted speed limits. It also rewards users with incentives and facilitates licensing with an in-app regulatory feature. Sultan Abu Ghazal and Elnura Zhalieva led the team, which also featured eight other master’s students.

The hackathon was held from January 30 to February 1, 2022, and the awards were announced on February 6, 2022, at the MENA Transport Congress and Exhibition. The runners-up, a team led by master’s student Muhammad Uzair Khattak that sought to improve traffic safety and compliance, were also from MBZUAI. Their solution, Salem, focused on motorcycle delivery drivers, monitoring them on their trips and offering incentives to boost compliance with safety regulations. This contrasts with the typical rating criteria for delivery drivers, which are based on the speed of service or

the number of deliveries completed. The app also displays a history of violations for each driver, allowing delivery companies and employers to review the statistics.

An all-female team of students won the recent virtual WomenHackAI including two graduating master’s students from MBZUAI.

The machine learning students

– Saarah Abdulla (Canada) and Hanin Al Ghothani (Syria)) were teamed up with like-minded female colleagues including Nathanya Queby (Indonesia), Anne Krus (Germany), Gwladys Djuikom (Cameroon), and Mobina Mobaraki (Iran). Presented by Siemens Female Data Science Network, five teams made up of 33 young data scientists had 48 hours to deliver AI solutions to five Siemens business challenges.

Abdulla, Al Ghothani and their teammates on team Women in AI and Robotics took the 7000 euro prize for their anomaly detector on financial time-series datasets.

A team from MBZUAI won DP World’s Big Tech Project – an international competition challenging students from leading universities in the UAE and India to solve trade challenges across the globe through the power of the metaverse.

Dhanalaxmi Gaddam, a master’s student in machine learning and Abbas Bamidele Abdulsalam, pursuing his master’s in computer vision, described their winning solution as two ideas in one – using the metaverse, virtual and augmented reality technologies to enhance training and productivity at DP World’s ports and terminals around the world.

MBZUAI students meet at one of the many eateries in Masdar City. File photo.

AN ALL-FEMALE TEAM OF STUDENTS WON THE RECENT VIRTUAL WOMENHACKAI INCLUDING TWO GRADUATING MASTER’S STUDENTS FROM MBZUAI.

STUDENTS PUBLISH AT TOP GLOBAL CONFERENCES

This year alone, MBZUAI students have presented papers at MICCAI, CVPR and ACL

An MBZUAI student studies in one of the university’s labs. File photo.

MBZUAI students are winning critical recognition in the global AI community, contributing papers to key conferences such as the 25th International Conference on Medical Image Computing and Computer Assisted Intervention (MICCAI), which many consider to be the most important annual conference in the medical image computing industry; at the 34th annual Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR); and at the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Logistics (ACL).

At CVPR, MBZUAI faculty and students presented 31 papers, including 6 oral presentations. At ACL, where Professor Timothy Baldwin delivered the presidential keynote address, a paper titled “MuCoT: Multilingual Contrastive Training for Question-Answering in Low-Resource Languages” was accepted for oral presentation. The paper was coauthored by three students: Gokul Karthik Kumar, Abhishek Singh Gehlot, Sahal Shaji Mullappilly, along with Dr. Karthik Nandakumar, Associate Professor of Computer Vision.

At MICCAI, the MBZUAI team’s contributions to the field were recognized at the conference, with eight academic papers accepted for presentation. Current master’s students were the lead authors on six of these papers, with two authored by MBZUAI researchers.

The papers stem from research conducted in the facilities at MBZUAI’s BioMedical Image Analysis (BioMedIA) laboratory led by Dr. Mohammad Yaqub, Assistant Professor of Computer Vision, and the Security, Privacy and Trustworthiness in Artificial Intelligence (SPriNT-AI) lab led by Nandakumar. There were three cited authors per paper on average, fewer than the typical number of five or more per accepted paper. According to Yaqub, this reflects the university’s preference for small, cohesive teams that are willing to work hard and

dedicate themselves to the process.

The papers record efforts to apply AI technologies, such as machine learning and deep learning, to improve the speed, accuracy and efficiency of existing medical procedures, as well as to ensure that the algorithms produced are trustworthy.

The papers accepted for presentation at MICCAI include:

• “TMSS: An End-to-End Transformer-Based Multimodal Network for Segmentation and Survival Prediction” by PhD student Numan Saeed and master’s students Ikboljon Sobirov and Roba Al Majzoub, who collaborated with Yaqub on the paper. Their analysis focused on a deep-learning method to help oncologists improve the accuracy of prognoses for patients with cancer.

• “DRGen: Domain Generalization in Diabetic Retinopathy Classification” by master’s student Mohammad Atwany in collaboration with Yaqub. The paper proposes a method for domain generalization – which can be a challenge when analyzing medical images due to the diversity of data – to classify a complication from diabetes.

• “Self-Ensembling Vision Transformer (SEViT) for Robust Medical Image Classification” by master’s student Faris Al Malik in collaboration with Yaqub and Nandakumar. The research proposes a new version of vision transformers, which aid in classifying and segmenting medical images, to make them less prone to adversarial attacks.

• “Suppressing Poisoning Attacks on Federated Learning for Medical Imaging” by master’s student Naif Alkhunaizi and research associate Dmitry Kamzolov in collaboration with Nandakumar and Associate Professor of Machine Learning Dr. Martin Takáč. The paper outlines a method to ensure security when

two different health care entities, such as hospitals, collaborate and share data.

• “EchoCoTr: Estimation of the Left Ventricular Ejection Fraction from Spatiotemporal Echocardiography” by master’s student Rand Muhtaseb in collaboration with Yaqub. The duo developed an algorithm to combine the strengths of two different methods for machine understanding of medical video data to improve on existing processes.

Three papers were accepted to MICCAI workshops:

• “GARDNet: Robust Multiview Network for Glaucoma Classification in Color Fundus Images” by master’s student Ahmed Al Mahrooqi in collaboration with Muhtaseb, master’s student Dmitrii Medvedev and Yaqub. The paper proposes how machinelearning algorithms can be used to improve the detection and categorization of the eye disease glaucoma.

• “End-to-End Myocardial Infarction Classification from Echocardiographic Scans” by master’s student Mohamed Saeed in collaboration with Yaqub. The analysis outlines a process to detect coronary artery disease by automating parts of the process with deep learning.

• “Automatic Quality Assessment of First Trimester Crown-RumpLength Ultrasound Images” by researcher Sevim Cengiz, master’s student Ibraheem Hamdi and Yaqub. The team used deep learning to verify that ultrasounds of fetuses in gestation are performed according to the clinical guidelines required for accuracy. In addition to her role at MBZUAI as a researcher in BioMedIA, Cengiz was recently awarded her Ph.D. from Istanbul’s Boğaziçi University.

CVPR, MBZUAI FACULTY AND STUDENTS PRESENTED 31 PAPERS, INCLUDING 6 ORAL PRESENTATIONS

SUPPORTING THE BRIGHTEST MINDS IN AI

Welcoming students from more than 40 countries, MBZUAI is an inclusive hub for brilliant minds

Assistant Professor of NLP Hanan Al Darmaki is a good example of MBZUAI’s diverse community. Her arrival, combined with that of several other new faculty members, helped raise MBZUAI’s global ranking to 24th among institutions that conduct research on AI, computer vision, machine learning and NLP. One of Al Darmaki’s colleagues is Najwa Aaraj, the first female faculty member in the university’s Machine Learning Department.

Aaraj also facilitates the relationship between MBZUAI and the Technology Innovation Institute (TII), which is part of Abu Dhabi’s Advanced Technology Research Council, to reach national targets. She is Chief Researcher in TII’s Cryptography Research Center, as well as Acting Chief Researcher in its Autonomous Robotics Research Centre.

Student leaders include Mugariya Farooq and Sarah Al Barri, who are candidates to complete their master’s degrees in machine learning in 2023. They finished second at the November 2021 Agritech Hackathon, organized by the Abu Dhabi Agriculture and Food Security Authority, with an algorithm that could help improve the efficiency of and reduce waste in the UAE’s agriculture sector. At the event, Farooq recalled, participants were given two days to complete a project addressing either food security or biosecurity.

Farooq and Al Barri created a machine-learning framework to find diseased plants using images, which were then used to predict yields. “Some diseases are communicable for plants as well,” Farooq said. “Our work tries to remove that plant at an early stage to reduce waste.” In combination with yield predictions, their analysis could help farmers estimate how much of their acreage to allocate to specific crops.

Another master’s student, Karima Kadaoui, is developing technology to help people with speech impediments improve their ability to communicate. She is building an app that will translate the words of people with cerebral palsy, complications from strokes and other speech impairments that affect the muscles required to enunciate clearly. This is especially important considering the ubiquity of voice-enabled technologies in daily life.

Sevim Cengiz is a part-time researcher at MBZUAI’s BioMedical Image Analysis laboratory, and she is also pursuing her Ph.D. at Istanbul’s Boğaziçi University. After becoming a biomedical engineer, she taught herself to code and transitioned into a career as an academic in AI, and she is currently focusing on magnetic resonance spectroscopic imaging analysis.

Cengiz recently collaborated with MBZUAI faculty member Dr. Mohammad Yaqub, Assistant Professor of Computer Vision, on a paper titled “Automatic Fetal Gestational Age Estimation from First Trimester Scans”. The paper was presented at the 25th International Conference on Medical Image Computing and Computer Assisted Intervention (MICCAI) in Singapore in September 2022.

The researchers’ AI-based algorithm has helped improve the accuracy of estimates of fetal development during the first trimester of pregnancies.

To maintain the momentum for women on campus, MBZUAI students Asma Hashmi and Ameera Bawazir founded the Women in AI club, a community that provides female students with a platform to showcase their expertise and invites female leaders in the science, technology, engineering and mathematics fields to speak.

“AI technologies will soften the boundaries that are the basis of the gender gap between men and women,” Hashmi said. “This makes it pivotal that women are provided with opportunities that allow them access to resources and quality education.”

(Above) Sevim Cengiz on MBZUAI campus. (Right) Ameera Bawazir takes part in a classroom session at MBZUAI.

“AI TECHNOLOGIES WILL SOFTEN THE BOUNDARIES THAT ARE THE BASIS OF THE GENDER GAP BETWEEN MEN AND WOMEN,”

MBZUAI STUDENT ASMA HASHMI

في نياثلا زكرملا اتلتحا ةيئاذغلا ةملاسلاو ةعارزلل بيظوبأ ةئيه هتمظن يذلا ةيمزراوخ امهئاشنإ دعب كلذو ،2021 برمفون في ليلقتو ةءافكلا ينسحت لىع ةدعاسملا اهنكمي

ةيبرعلا تاراملإا في ةعارزلا عاطق في تايافنلا اوحنم ينكراشملا نأ لىإ

عيراشملا راطإ في

دمحم ةعماج ىوتسم ظحلات ىبركلا تاكشرلا

في عوشرم ميدقت مت ،يعانطصلاا ءاكذلل دياز نب

ماقي يذلا ”سكتياج“

،ةدحتملا ةيبرعلا تاراملإا ةعماج نم يعانطصلاا بوسالحا مولع مسق في ةدعاسم ةذاتسأ تناك ثيح

عاطقلا في راودأ ةدع تلوت امك

ثوحب نم يعانطصلاا ءاكذلا لاجم همزلتسي .بهاوملا ةيمنتل صرفو تاراكتباو ربوتكأ 9و 8 في تيرجأ تيلا لىولأا لمعلا ةشرو