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Leading the Future of AI Research
KAUST’s Artificial Intelligence Initiative is attracting top-tier talent as it scales up
The KAUST Artificial Intelligence (AI) Initiative made headlines in September 2021 when it announced that Dr. Jürgen Schmidhuber, a world-renowned computer scientist and AI expert, would join the university and serve as director of the innovative program. The initiative is the university’s next step toward its goal of becoming an international leader in the field, as it works to embed AI across its disciplines and activities.
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In hiring Schmidhuber, the university gains a leader with an international reputation, adding gravitas to the effort and accelerating its pace of development. Schmidhuber has been a global leader in AI for three decades, and first achieved fame for his role in inventing the Long ShortTerm Memory (LSTM) Network. He is among the world’s foremost experts in artificial neural networks, has authored more than 350 peer-reviewed papers and served as an advisor to multiple governments on AI strategies.
His work underpins many of the technologies the world relies on today, such as the technology powering Apple’s personal assistant, Siri, as well as Amazon’s Alexa. He also helped create the speech-recognition technology that is used in Android smartphones, as well as the LSTM technology Facebook started using in 2017 that translates around 30 billion messages a day – a rate of nearly 350,000 messages per second.
Schmidhuber also has expertise in deep learning and the detection of cancer using medical imaging. Even so, he considers his role and life goals as transcending any one product, company or scientific narrative.
NEW FACULTY RECRUIT TO KAUST
Writing in the magazine Scientific American in 2017, he described a vision broader than the next industrial revolution: “As a boy, I wanted to maximize my impact on the world, so I decided I would build a self-improving AI that could learn to become much smarter than I am.”
Prior to joining KAUST, in 2014 he co-founded the Swiss firm NNAISENSE to build large-scale neural-network solutions for industry. He earned his PhD in computer science from the Technical University of Munich. Most recently, he held the title of scientific director at the Swiss AI Lab IDSIA and was a professor of AI at the University of Lugano in Switzerland. He joins another high-profile hire from the AI scene, Lawrence Carin, who was named KAUST Provost in January 2021. Carin comes from Duke University, where he served as the vice president for research.
As an illustration of KAUST’s strength in AI and machine learning, in July 2021, KAUST researchers placed Saudi Arabia among the top-20 countries
WE WILL WORK WITH THE SAUDI DATA AND ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE (AI) AUTHORITY IN DATA SCIENCE AND AI IN AREAS THAT INCLUDE HEALTH, ENERGY, THE ENVIRONMENT, WATER AND AGRICULTURE, AS WELL AS BIOINFORMATICS AND NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING TO JOINTLY DEVELOP ACADEMIC PROGRAMS, AND SUPPORT THE DEVELOPMENT OF AI STARTUPS AND THE COMMERCIALIZATION OF AI RESEARCH.
in the world for the number of papers appearing in the highly selective International Conference on Machine Learning, with all of the papers contributed by the Kingdom coming from KAUST.
AI is a key enabler of KAUST’s long-term strategy, and Saudi Arabia has seeded it across its Vision 2030 goals. AI has been used to prevent cyberattacks, reduce the spread of COVID-19 and digitalize public services. Vision 2030 envisions a 54% reduction in dwell time at maritime ports, for example, and the launch of smart cities such as NEOM. Schmidhuber’s role at KAUST will include recruiting new faculty members and developing educational and entrepreneurial
programs, which is expected to facilitate increased KAUST collaboration with key public and private sector institutions in Saudi Arabia. This will include working with the National Center for AI, a division of the Saudi Data and AI Authority, to collaborate on academic programs, support emerging companies involved in AI, and develop infrastructure and data for use in research and innovation. For the KAUST AI Initiative, the next steps will include bringing together faculty members from the community to pursue machine learning, deep learning, robotics, bioinformatics and natural language processing, as well as non-traditional architectures for these technologies.
LAWRENCE CARIN Provost
