MBZUAI Ph.D. candidate Muhammad Maaz has been awarded the 2025 Google Ph.D. Fellowship in Machine Perception. Maaz is the first student from MBZUAI and the first from the Gulf region to receive this recognition, which includes funding, mentorship, and $50,000. He has published extensively in top-tier CV/NLP venues and has over 4,500 citations. Why it matters: This award highlights the growing prominence of MBZUAI and the increasing quality of AI research in the Gulf region on the global stage.
Muhammad Arslan Manzoor became MBZUAI's first NLP Ph.D. graduate, focusing his research on media bias under Professor Preslav Nakov. His thesis, 'MGM,' explored using audience overlap graphs to predict the factuality and bias of news media, an approach that differs from traditional textual analysis. Manzoor's work aims to improve the efficiency of media profiling in real-time by leveraging relationships captured in media graphs. Why it matters: This research offers innovative methods for identifying bias in news, which is crucial for promoting informed social discourse and combating disinformation in the region.
MBZUAI awarded its first Ph.D. to Numan Saeed for his dissertation, "Deep Learning for Cancer Diagnosis and Prognosis." Saeed's research explores using deep learning models to diagnose tumors and predict survival rates for head and neck cancers by interpreting PET and CT scan imagery and doctor's notes. The AI model considers variables like age, gender, and tumor size to improve diagnosis, especially in regions with limited oncological services. Why it matters: This milestone highlights MBZUAI's growing role in AI research and its potential to contribute to advancements in AI-driven healthcare solutions, particularly for cancer diagnosis and treatment.
MBZUAI students Hanoona Bangalath and Muhammad Maaz, with perfect GPAs, had papers accepted at ECCV 2022 ("Class-agnostic Object Detection with Multi-modal Transformer") and NeurIPS 2022 ("Bridging the Gap between Object and Image-level Representation for Open-Vocabulary Detection"). Both will stay at MBZUAI for their PhDs, crediting the university's resources and faculty. Their supervisor, Salman Khan, praised their curiosity and hard work, highlighting their role in building the institution's reputation. Why it matters: The success of these students underscores MBZUAI's potential to foster high-quality AI research and attract top talent to the UAE.
MBZUAI Ph.D. students Muhammad Maaz and Hanoona Rasheed interned at Meta, developing a vision encoder for images and videos. They created PerceptionLM, a multimodal language model, to generate synthetic video-caption data to train the Perception Encoder. The team addressed the challenge of limited labeled video data by building a multimodal language model called PerceptionLM to understand video's spatial and temporal aspects. Why it matters: This highlights MBZUAI's strength in computer vision and provides students opportunities to contribute to cutting-edge research at global tech firms.