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.
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.
A team of MBZUAI graduate students won first place at the UAE University's University Challenge for their SawabAI project, which addresses AI-generated misinformation about climate change. The winning team included Salem Bin Saqer AlMarri, Hanoona Bangalath, and Muhammad Maaz, all Computer Vision Ph.D. students. SawabAI is envisioned as a platform to evaluate the authenticity and source of information, including text, image, and video, to combat fake news. Why it matters: This win highlights the growing importance of AI in addressing misinformation and promoting sustainability in government communication within the region.
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.