Xie brings healthcare and machine learning focus to MBZUAI

MBZUAI welcomes Dr. Pengtao Xie as he joins the faculty as an assistant professor in machine learning. Xie comes to the university to teach and conduct research with a particular interest in healthcare and machine learning inspired by human learning skills.

“I am excited to be joining such a young, niche AI learning and research institute,” Xie said. Currently Xie is working on developing automated machine learning methods for healthcare, such as automatically searching for high-performance neural architectures for pneumonia detection from chest X-rays.

“We leverage multi-level optimization methods to transfer human learning skills to machine learning,” he said. “We apply our method for pneumonia detection from chest x-rays. It achieves state-of-the-art performance with an accuracy of 95%. The paper is under second-round revision by Nature Scientific Report. Xie’s highly acclaimed Ph.D. thesis “Diversity Promoting and Large-scale Machine Learning for Healthcare” was selected as a top five finalist in the 2020 American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA): Doctoral Dissertation Award.

“We continue to secure the best faculty talent from around the world to Abu Dhabi,”  Professor Eric Xing, President of MBZUAI, said. “I am thrilled to welcome Professor Xie in an adjunct capacity while he also continues his great work for UC San Diego. This will strengthen our partnerships, our research and our teaching capabilities.”

Xie will work closely with the students and fellow faculty to achieve great results at MBZUAI. Xie received his Ph.D. from the Machine Learning Department at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh in 2018.  Professor Xie has made an impact at his previous institutions and is the recipient of the Amazon AWS Faculty Award, Tencent AI-Lab Faculty Award, Tencent WeChat Faculty Award, the Innovator Award and the Siebel Scholars Award.