MBZUAI FACULTY LEAD GLOBAL CONFERENCES

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 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.

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

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.

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 analysis.

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

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 co-chair 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) 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.

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

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.

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.