Feb 9 – Feb 15, 2026

Professor Mohamed-Slim Alouini elected to the U.S. National Academy of Engineering

KAUST · Feb 11 · Research Partnership

Professor Mohamed-Slim Alouini of KAUST has been elected to the U.S. National Academy of Engineering for his contributions to wireless communication systems. Alouini is the first faculty member elected to the NAE while serving at KAUST, and his work focuses on non-terrestrial networks. He aims to extend connectivity to underserved regions and support applications like emergency response and environmental monitoring. Why it matters: This recognition highlights KAUST's ability to attract world-leading scholars and contributes to Saudi Vision 2030 by translating research into real-world impact.

KAUST becomes first FIFA research institute in the Middle East and Asia

KAUST · Feb 10 · Partnership Research

KAUST has been selected as the first FIFA Research Institute in the Middle East and Asia. KAUST will apply its research expertise to advance football-related studies, initially focusing on developing datasets that enable deeper insights into the game. The collaboration’s first project focuses on developing AI algorithms to analyze historical FIFA World Cup broadcast footage, while the second project leverages player and ball tracking data from the FIFA World Cup 2022™ Qatar and the FIFA Women’s World Cup 2023™ Australia & New Zealand. Why it matters: This partnership strengthens the intersection of sport, academia, and industry in the region through high-impact scientific inquiry.

KAUST study explores underground hydrogen storage using existing oil reservoirs

KAUST · Feb 15 · Research Infrastructure

ADAB: Arabic Dataset for Automated Politeness Benchmarking -- A Large-Scale Resource for Computational Sociopragmatics

arXiv · Feb 14 · NLP Arabic AI

Positioning energy storage as the backbone of the clean energy transition

KAUST · Feb 10 · Infrastructure Research

From FusHa to Folk: Exploring Cross-Lingual Transfer in Arabic Language Models

arXiv · Feb 10 · NLP Arabic AI

AraModernBERT: Transtokenized Initialization and Long-Context Encoder Modeling for Arabic

arXiv · Feb 10 · NLP Arabic AI

Head-to-Head autonomous racing at the limits of handling in the A2RL challenge

arXiv · Feb 9 · Robotics RL