Harvard’s Parkes brings AI insights to UAE

Harvard University Professor David C. Parkes will take participants through an exciting session this week on AI, Machine Learning and Economy as part of the MBZUAI Executive Program. As a globally known researcher, Parkes has broken ground in multi-agent AI, bounded rationality, machine learning and decisions, intelligence architectures, game theory, and algorithmic economics.

42 Participants in total make up the first cohort of the Executive Program that includes ministers and C-suite executives. The program seeks to support the UAE’s mission to become a world leader in artificial intelligence through education, capacity building, innovation, and research and development.

The Executive Program, which is headed up by MBZUAI President, Professor Eric Xing, is a uniquely powerful learning experience for high-level decision makers. Participants spend 12 weeks learning from the global elite in AI-related research, with the end goal of supporting a range of improvements in healthcare, transportation, education, industry, and more.

About David Parkes

David C. Parkes is a Professor at Harvard University and a George F. Colony Professor of Computer Science. He also holds the positions of Co-Director of Harvard Data Science Initiative and Co-Chair of FAS Data Science Masters and Harvard Business Analytics Certificate Program.

Parkes has been bestowed with numerous awards and honors like the Best Higher Cognition paper published in the Cognitive Science Conference Proceedings, ACM SIGAI Autonomous Agents Research Award and SEAS Faculty Collaboration Award. He has also been a Fellow at the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) and has been elected to the Computing Community Consortium (CCC), a standing committee of the CRA.

He holds a master’s in engineering and computing science from the University of Oxford and a Ph.D. in computer and information science from the University of Pennsylvania.