The Technology Innovation Institute (TII) and NYU Abu Dhabi (NYUAD) have signed a collaboration agreement to deepen strategic collaboration in research, education, and talent development. The partnership includes a Research and Development Sponsorship Agreement and a Framework Fellowship Program Agreement. TII and NYUAD will collaborate on joint research projects across areas like AI, robotics, and quantum science, and TII will sponsor NYUAD students for research in priority technology domains. Why it matters: The partnership aims to bridge fundamental research with real-world applications, accelerate scientific discovery, and develop a pipeline of skilled researchers in Abu Dhabi.
Dr. Reem Ashour from TII's Autonomous Robotics Research Center has been appointed as Secretary of the UAE IEEE Women in Engineering (WIE) leadership committee for 2024-2025. Dr. Ashour collaborated with Dr. Diana Dawoud (University of Dubai) and Dr. Lilas Alrahis (NYUAD) to develop the proposal for the UAE chapter of IEEE WIE. Dr. Ashour will participate in the IEEE WIE International Leadership Summits (ILS) 2024 in Dubai. Why it matters: This appointment highlights the increasing role of women in STEM leadership in the UAE and provides a platform for TII to contribute to global discussions on gender equality in engineering.
This paper describes the QCRI-Columbia-NYUAD group's Egyptian Arabic-to-English statistical machine translation system submitted to the NIST OpenMT'2015 competition. The system used tools like 3arrib and MADAMIRA for processing and standardizing informal dialectal Arabic. The system was trained using phrase-based SMT with features such as operation sequence model, class-based language model and neural network joint model. Why it matters: The work demonstrates advances in machine translation for dialectal Arabic, a challenging but important area for regional communication and NLP research.
Eliseo Ferrante from NYU Abu Dhabi presented work on increasing the controllability of swarm robotics systems. The research covers microscopic control via implicit intelligent leaders and macroscopic control via automated generation of swarm behaviors. Grammatical evolution and generative AI methods are used to produce collective behaviors aligned with human specifications. Why it matters: This research enhances the applicability of swarm robotics in real-world scenarios by improving control and coordination, potentially impacting industries like logistics, environmental monitoring, and disaster response in the region.
NYUAD and MBZUAI co-hosted the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP) in Abu Dhabi from December 7-11. EMNLP is a top-tier NLP and AI conference organized by the ACL special interest group on linguistic data (SIGDAT). MBZUAI's Natural Language Processing Department is actively developing NLP datasets and methods to solve social problems. Why it matters: Hosting EMNLP in the UAE highlights the growing importance of NLP research in the region and the increasing contributions of local institutions like MBZUAI to the field.