Alumni Spotlight: Aspiration rooted in Research

To say Hanan Gani is one in a million might sound dramatic, but it’s almost literally true. 

Having applied to study as an undergraduate at one of the National Institutes of India, he had to compete against almost 1.5 million fellow students for a coveted place — with only 1% of applicants winning a seat.  

But win he did, joining the National Institute of Technology in 2014 to study electronics and communication engineering, with a minor in computer science: His first step on what would become a successful career in AI and academia. 

Fast-forward 11 years, and the native Kashmiri — a 2024 graduate from MBZUAI, with a master’s in machine learning — is at the forefront of AI research in the UAE. As a research associate at MBZUAI, Hanan is working on a pioneering meteorological project with the UAE government alongside his own research into multimodal and embodied intelligence, as well as mentoring the next generation of AI students in a bid to help them navigate the world of academia and research more easily and successfully. 

That decade in-between saw Hanan excel in his studies, self-learn the basics of AI, spend time in industry, start an NGO, and publish a constant stream of research papers at leading conferences. All of which has convinced him that research is where his future lies, as he awaits the results of his application to join MBZUAI’s Ph.D. program. 

“I’m very much inclined towards academia,” he says. “Academia gives me the freedom to explore and research a lot of different things, academia is where you can make major breakthroughs, and academia is where I can teach. 

“I knew from early on that I want to go for higher studies. I’ve done an undergraduate, I’ve done a master’s, and I will hopefully do a Ph.D.  The UAE has been an excellent place to study. Here they are very enthusiastic about accommodating AI in their systems — they are very much forward-looking, and I believe that’s required in today’s world. And MBZUAI is incredibly research-friendly. The environment here has no comparison in terms of resources, mentorship and guidance. The life we’re living here is something that most students don’t get, and that’s a major driving force for many of us to stay after graduation. 

“My future goal is to be a research faculty member at the University. I have a deep connection with this place, and if I’m fortunate enough, I would love to be part of MBZUAI’s future.” 

Research success 

If his research career so far is anything to go by, Hanan’s goal is well within reach. His first paper was published back in 2018 as an undergraduate, before publishing nine papers at MBZUAI, ranging from How to Train Vision Transformer on Small-Scale Datasets? (published at BMVC 2022) to LLM-Blueprint: Enabling Text-to-Image Generation using Complex and Detailed Prompts (published at ICLR 2024). 

This year alone, he has had papers accepted into COLING 2025 and NAACL 2025, as well as CVPR 2025 for his paper VideoGLaMM: A Large Multimodal Model for Pixel-Level Visual Grounding in Videos. VideoGLaMM is an extension of GLaMM — a large language model that has been developed as part of MBZUAI’s Institute of Foundation Models. 

Alongside his research, Hanan has also secured a U.S. Patent for a system and method of training a vision transformer on small-scale datasets. The system and method includes an imaging system for capturing and processing small scale images, a machine learning engine, and display. 

Since graduating, his research has taken on a new dimension, working on two very different but equally innovative projects.  

“The first project is with the UAE government,” says Hanan. “It’s about how to optimize the clouds for rainfall. It’s very novel and very applicable, and if we can pull it off it will be a really huge breakthrough in terms of cost savings and maybe in reducing global warming. 

“The other project is about embodied intelligence and how to reduce the understanding-gap between humans and machines. Because us humans can understand and feel, we know how to close a laptop, for example — where we place our hands, how lightly or firmly we should close our fingers on the lid of the laptop, and how fast or slow we need to move up or down in order to open or close the laptop. This simple thing is hard for robots to do right now, because they need to first understand our instruction, and then they have to reason based on their environment, and then they have to perform the action. It’s an exciting thing to be working on.” 

Exciting though it is, this research does not come without its challenges, including the pressure to be current. 

“Every day 100 new research papers are published, and many new things are coming up, and you have to be updated with all of it,” says Gani. “There’s definitely a pressure to stay aware of it all, and to keep your research relevant. I always try to make sure my work has long-term impact – it should be relevant even after five years.” 

Paying it forward 

Despite dedicating so much of his attention to all things research related, Hanan nonetheless finds time to engage in another activity deeply important to him: mentorship. 

Having been the beneficiary of mentorship over the years — including his supervisor at MBZUAI, Salman Khan, Associate Professor of Computer Vision — Hanan has long understood its value, resulting in his own mentoring practice from an early age. 

“I started mentoring during my undergraduate degree,” he says. “We set up a small NGO and we were helping high school students gain some answers to questions about their options after high school, and how they can find a pathway towards what they want to do. 

“Since then that interest grew and I have been involved for a few years now mentoring students. I’m also a part of the MBZUAI mentorship initiative for the master’s students — mentoring three students from the current batch. With all the exposure I gained from the master’s program – the lessons I learned and the mistakes I made — I feel it’s my duty to at least share this knowledge with newer students.” 

The pilot mentoring program is being run by the University’s Alumni Relations department, and is aimed at supporting students who will soon be graduating. As an alumni mentor, Hanan is giving three mentees the benefit of his experience in navigating graduation and what comes next. 

“I try to tell my mentees that they might face issues or difficulties, but they have to be optimistic. There will be mistakes, but it depends on how you or your mind react to them. Their time at MBZUAI is part of a whole journey, and everything that happens is a lesson to help you learn something along the way.” 

It’s sound advice from Hanan, whose own research journey continues to be a lesson in dedication, innovation, and academic aspiration.