KAUST and the Ministry of Innovational Development of Uzbekistan signed a Memorandum of Cooperation (MoC) to collaborate on science, technology, and innovation. The agreement aims to leverage scientific strengths between the two entities through information sharing, personnel exchange, project support, and internship assistance. A Joint Working Group will coordinate the activities. Why it matters: This partnership expands KAUST's reach into Central Asia, potentially fostering joint research and development in areas like AI and sustainability.
KAUST, Saudi Aramco, and the Ministry of Energy convened the Crude Oil to Chemicals Innovative Technologies Conference on October 23-25. The conference focused on catalysts, process optimization, and fundamental approaches for oil-to-chemicals conversion. KAUST also signed an MOU with Saudi Aramco, the Ministry of Energy, and the Oil Sustainability Program to develop relevant technologies. Why it matters: This initiative signals a move towards more sustainable hydrocarbon use and the development of advanced materials in the Kingdom.
KAUST and the International Medical Center (IMC) have signed an MoU to collaborate on medical research related to wellness, quality of life, and population health management. The partnership aims to develop AI applications for diagnosis and treatment, along with research in precision medicine and advanced therapies. The collaboration aligns with Saudi Vision 2030's goals to build a sustainable, knowledge-driven healthcare future. Why it matters: This agreement signifies a push to integrate AI and precision medicine into practical medical solutions within the Saudi healthcare system.
Researchers from MBZUAI have introduced VideoMolmo, a large multimodal model for spatio-temporal pointing conditioned on textual descriptions. The model incorporates a temporal module with an attention mechanism and a temporal mask fusion pipeline using SAM2 for improved coherence across video sequences. They also curated a dataset of 72k video-caption pairs and introduced VPoS-Bench, a benchmark for evaluating generalization across real-world scenarios, with code and models publicly available.
A new benchmark, LongShOTBench, is introduced for evaluating multimodal reasoning and tool use in long videos, featuring open-ended questions and diagnostic rubrics. The benchmark addresses the limitations of existing datasets by combining temporal length and multimodal richness, using human-validated samples. LongShOTAgent, an agentic system, is also presented for analyzing long videos, with both the benchmark and agent demonstrating the challenges faced by state-of-the-art MLLMs.
Conor McMenamin from Universitat Pompeu Fabra presented a seminar on State Machine Replication (SMR) without honest participants. The talk covered the limitations of current SMR protocols and introduced the ByRa model, a framework for player characterization free of honest participants. He then described FAIRSICAL, a sandbox SMR protocol, and discussed how the ideas could be extended to real-world protocols, with a focus on blockchains and cryptocurrencies. Why it matters: This research on SMR protocols and their incentive compatibility could lead to more robust and secure blockchain technologies in the region.
A KAUST team led by Hossein Fariborzi won second place in the MEMS Design Contest for their "MEMS Resonator for Oscillator, Tunable Filter and Re-Programmable Logic Applications." The device is runtime-reprogrammable, allowing the function of each device in the circuit to be changed during operation. The KAUST team demonstrated that two MEMS resonators could replace over 20 transistors in applications like digital adders, reducing digital circuit complexity. Why it matters: This innovation could significantly reduce power consumption, chip area, and manufacturing costs in microprocessors, advancing the development of energy-efficient microcomputers in the region.