Steer Studios, the global games studio arm of Savvy Games Group, held a company day at KAUST to recruit talent. Savvy Games Group aims to invest SAR 142 billion to establish 250 game companies in Saudi Arabia and create 39,000 jobs. Steer Studios representatives interviewed and networked with KAUST students, seeking skills in marketing, computer engineering, 3D art, animation, and game design. Why it matters: This event highlights Saudi Arabia's commitment to developing its gaming and esports sector, aligning with Vision 2030 and creating opportunities for local talent in a rapidly growing industry.
KAUST held an Innovation & Economic Development Open House event on October 4 and 5. The event showcased industry partners in the KAUST Innovation Cluster, including Dow Chemical, SABIC, Saudi Aramco, and startups like FalconViz and NOMADD. Student groups like the Entrepreneurship Business & Innovation Group (eBIG) also participated, highlighting efforts to foster innovation within the KAUST community. Why it matters: This event demonstrates KAUST's ongoing commitment to fostering entrepreneurship and translating research into real-world applications, aligning with Saudi Arabia's broader economic diversification goals.
Entrepreneur Alexandru Ionut Budisteanu spoke at KAUST's 2018 Winter Enrichment Program (WEP) about pursuing one's passion to achieve their dreams. Budisteanu shared his journey of creating video games and building an autonomous self-driving car prototype. He emphasized the importance of finding a job or activity that one loves and working with passion. Why it matters: Showcases KAUST's efforts to host inspiring speakers and promote entrepreneurship among students.
KAUST Professor Peter Markowich discusses the role of mathematics in football, describing a match as a random process with a drift. The randomness stems from player conditions, referee decisions, weather, and more, while the drift represents the higher probability of the better team winning. He notes that the complexity arising from 11 players on each side increases the randomness compared to sports like tennis. Why it matters: This perspective highlights the interplay of chance and skill in sports, offering a mathematical lens for understanding game dynamics.
Chess grandmaster Susan Polgar visited KAUST during the 2018 Winter Enrichment Program and played a simultaneous chess exhibition with 10 KAUST Chess Club members, winning against all of them. Polgar also delivered a lecture on how AI has transformed the chess world, referencing the 1997 IBM supercomputer victory over Garry Kasparov. She expressed being impressed by KAUST's facilities and the resources available to faculty and students. Why it matters: This event highlights KAUST's engagement with AI-related topics beyond traditional research, showcasing the university as a hub for diverse intellectual discussions.
Ekaterina Vylomova from the University of Melbourne gave a talk on using NLP models to advance research in linguistic morphology, typology, and social psychology. The talk covered using models to study morphology, phonetic changes in words over time, and diachronic changes in language semantics. Vylomova presented the UniMorph project, a cross-lingual annotation schema and database with morphological paradigms for over 150 languages. Why it matters: This research demonstrates the potential of NLP to contribute to a deeper understanding of language evolution and structure, with applications in linguistic research and the study of social and cultural changes.
This article previews a talk by Dr. Wei Cai of CUHK-Shenzhen on the history, development, and future trends of the Web3 metaverse. The talk will cover industrial Web3 metaverse cases, recent research outcomes, and the metaverse research spectrum. Dr. Cai's research interests include blockchain, Web 3.0, digital games, and computational art. Why it matters: As metaverse technologies continue to evolve, understanding the Web3 perspective and research directions is important for regional AI and technology development.
Nicu Sebe from the University of Trento presented recent work on video generation, focusing on animating objects in a source image using external information like labels, driving videos, or text. He introduced a Learnable Game Engine (LGE) trained from monocular annotated videos, which maintains states of scenes, objects, and agents to render controllable viewpoints. Why it matters: This talk highlights advancements in cross-modal AI, potentially enabling new applications in gaming, simulation, and content creation within the region.