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EMPLOYERS RECOGNIZE STUDENT INNOVATIONS
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.
On September 7, 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, internship opportunities and more.
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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.
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.
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.
MBZUAI students meet at one of the many eateries in Masdar City. File photo.
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.
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 master’s students xx.
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.
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.
