From student to clean tech startup

No one was more surprised than Yahia Dalbah when he pivoted away from electrical engineering towards an environmental science startup which is on a mission to cool cities and keep them livable into the future.

As part of his MBZUAI studies, Dalbah undertook an internship at Abu Dhabi-based FortyGuard – a clean tech company providing geospatial analysis and insights of outdoor temperatures through a cloud-based AI tool– where he has accepted a full-time role as a research and development engineer.

“To be honest, I did not envision myself working in such a field, let alone a startup, but I have always been excited about working on new things and being involved in multidisciplinary projects, so needless to say I am thrilled to be a part of FortyGuard,” Dalbah said.

“We make a solid argument at FortyGuard; that we cannot change what we cannot measure. FortyGuard provides a tool which measures everything that is relevant to heat, temperature, and what is affecting them. As a research and development engineer, I will be responsible for the proprietary machine learning and computer vision algorithms that FortyGuard adapts in bringing these analytics to governments, businesses, and other end users.

“I will handle most of the research, implementation, and testing of the tools that consist of the FortyGuard technology. Along with the tech team, we bring forward all the technologies that the company prides itself in like temperature heat mapping, image/video analytics, and recommendations and insights.

AI, however, could bring a new, seemingly abstract answer and understanding that we have not been able to reach, and I am excited to see that.

“Sustainability is the main working theme of FortyGuard, and it is not a secret that we are very excited to be significant contributors to a vision that has explicit emphasis on green outcomes, but in a unique and essential way,” he added. Dalbah credits MBZUAI for providing the software skills necessary for him to expand his career ambitions. “Coming from an electrical engineering background, especially one with emphasis on hardware and less so on software, posed a challenge at the start of my journey,” he said. “After completing my masters, I believe that I now have a very robust understanding of both software and hardware in a variety of fields, and I do believe that this mix is one of the most important mixes to achieve excellence in multidisciplinary fields.”

He also strengthened his ability to deliver impactful research, completing his thesis on tackling the common task of object detection and semantic segmentation in computer vision with raw radar signals instead of common camera image approaches. Radar signals provide a novel approach to scene understanding through fast acquisition of data, robustness against adverse weather conditions, and lower cost of operation.

Dalbah sees many applications of radar-based sensing despite it being in its infancy. “It has shown promising results in being a weather-resistant sensing technique, which can be immensely helpful in building safety measures in autonomous vehicles for adverse scenarios like fog and rain,” he explains. “We are also one of the early adopters of this sensing technique in computer vision research, where most works in the literature focus on other sensing techniques like cameras and LiDARs (Light Detection and Ranging). In the context of limited power usage of car batteries and sensing capacity, radar-based sensing could be significant.”

Dalbah is one of 59 computer vision, machine learning, and natural language processing (NLP) students who received their master’s degrees as part of the Class of 2023 commencement ceremony on June 4 at the Abu Dhabi Energy Centre. Similarly, to Dalbah, other Class of 2023 graduates have already secured full-time employment nationally and internationally with ADNOC, SnapChat (UK), Transco, Abu Dhabi Police, and Inception Institute of Artificial Intelligence (IIAI)/G42. More than half of the graduates undertook a voluntary internship last summer to gain invaluable industry experience.