KAUST Associate Professor Hakan Bagci has been recognized as a Senior Member of the International Union of Radio Science (URSI) for his work in computational electromagnetics. Bagci credits his research group at KAUST and the university's collaborative environment for his success. He received degrees from Bilkent University and the University of Illinois before joining KAUST in 2009. Why it matters: This recognition highlights the growing expertise in electromagnetics and related fields at KAUST, contributing to Saudi Arabia's research profile.
Sahika Inal is an assistant professor of bioscience at KAUST's Biological and Environmental Science and Engineering Division. She is a faculty member at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology. Why it matters: This highlights KAUST's ongoing investment in attracting research talent in bioscience.
Technology Innovation Institute (TII) has appointed Dr. Hakim Hacid as Chief Researcher of its AI and Digital Science Research Center (AIDRC), the home of the Falcon LLM series. Dr. Hacid previously served as Executive Director and Acting Chief Researcher at TII, after joining in 2022 from Zayed University. He brings expertise in AI, ML, data science, and information retrieval, with prior experience at Bell Labs and Macquarie University. Why it matters: The appointment strengthens TII's leadership in AI research and development, particularly for the Falcon series of open-source LLMs that have gained global recognition.
The content describes Hassan Alsibyani from the class of 2017 as a student commencement speaker at KAUST. It also contains boilerplate copyright information about King Abdullah University of Science and Technology. Why it matters: This is a routine announcement of student activities at KAUST.
MBZUAI's Hanan Al Darmaki is working to improve automated speech recognition (ASR) for low-resource languages, where labeled data is scarce. She notes that Arabic presents unique challenges due to dialectal variations and a lack of written resources corresponding to spoken dialects. Al Darmaki's research focuses on unsupervised speech recognition to address this gap. Why it matters: Overcoming these challenges can improve virtual assistant effectiveness across diverse languages and enable more inclusive AI applications in the Arabic-speaking world.
MBZUAI alumnus Hanan Gani, a 2024 master's graduate in machine learning, is now a research associate at MBZUAI working on a meteorological project with the UAE government. He also focuses on multimodal and embodied intelligence research, mentors AI students, and has published nine papers during his time at MBZUAI. His research includes work on vision transformers, text-to-image generation, and large multimodal models. Why it matters: Showcases MBZUAI's role in attracting and developing AI talent within the UAE, contributing to the nation's AI research capabilities.
Two KAUST Ph.D. students participated in Junction 2018, a 48-hour international hackathon in Helsinki. One student, Yan Gong, was part of a winning team that addressed the "Adaptive Smart Heating" challenge. Another student, Torsten Hädrich, and his team designed a VR-based solution for healthcare using motion tracking to analyze patient motor skills. Why it matters: This participation highlights KAUST's engagement in global technology innovation and the application of its research to real-world challenges in energy and healthcare.
KAUST Professor Hong Im has been inducted into the National Academy of Engineering of Korea (NAEK) as an international member. He was selected for his contributions to the theory and computational modeling of combustion, specifically direct numerical simulations (DNS) of turbulent combustion. Since 2013, he has been a core faculty member of the Clean Combustion Research Center (CCRC) at KAUST. Why it matters: This recognition highlights KAUST's role in attracting and fostering world-class engineering talent and its contributions to advanced power generation research.