MBZUAI faculty lead global conferences

For generations the peer review process has been a central part of conducting and publishing great science, and as such, is considered important for assessing the quality of faculty and their work. In AI and related disciplines – both publishing in conference proceedings and leadership of conferences – are indicators of quality. MBZUAI faculty, for example, have led or co-led a remarkable number of top, global AI conferences in 2022 including the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), the International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), Causal Learning and Reasoning (CLeaR 2022), and the conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI).

Due to the high quality of MBZUAI faculty and their published work, the most recent CSRankings place the university in the top 30 globally in its core disciplines — artificial intelligence, computer vision, machine learning, and natural language processing. This ranking places the university ahead of a long list of renowned research universities worldwide such as the University of Michigan, Georgia Tech, and the University of Toronto in North America; Imperial College London, EPFL, and the Max Planck Society in Europe; the University of Tokyo, Seoul National University, and the University of Sydney in Asia Pacific.

MBZUAI faculty who are leading or chairing top conferences in 2022 include Timothy Baldwin, Le Song, Kun Zhang, and Preslav Nakov. Additionally, MBZUAI faculty regularly serve as area chairs including Salman Khan and Fahad Khan who both served as area chairs at CVPR 2022.

Timothy Baldwin

Baldwin delivered the presidential keynote address at the 60th annual meeting of the ACL. Baldwin headlined the global conference, which was held in Dublin, in his capacity as president of the association. He also published three conference papers as part of ACL 2022.

Prior to joining MBZUAI, Baldwin spent 17 years at the University of Melbourne, including roles as Melbourne Laureate Professor, Director of the ARC Training Centre in Cognitive Computing for Medical Technologies (in partnership with IBM), Associate Dean Research Training in the Melbourne School of Engineering, and Deputy Head of the Department of Computing and Information Systems.

He has previously held visiting positions at Cambridge University, University of Washington, University of Tokyo, Saarland University, NTT Communication Science Laboratories, and National Institute of Informatics.

Le Song

MBZUAI Department Chair and Professor of Machine Learning Le Song will serve as a program chair at the 39th International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) conference, which will be held in Baltimore, Maryland from July 17-23, 2022.

Song joins a list of eminent co-chairs from MIT, Facebook, the University of Cambridge, Google, DeepMind, Carnegie Mellon, Oxford, Princeton, and Microsoft. Kamalika Chaudhuri of UCSD and Facebook AI Research is the 2022 general chair. Song joins Csaba Szepesvari of DeepMind and the University of Alberta, and Stefanie Jegelka of MIT as program co-chairs.

At last count MBZUAI faculty, researchers, and students have 7 papers accepted at ICML 2022, including those from President, Professor Eric Xing, Associate Professor of Machine Learning Martin Takáč, Associate Professor of Machine Learning Kun Zhang, Assistant Professor of Machine Learning Bin Gu, and Assistant Professor of Machine Learning Pengtao Xie.

Prior to joining MBZUAI, Song served as an associate professor of computational science and engineering and the associate director of the Center for Machine Learning at Georgia Institute of Technology in the USA. He has held positions at Georgia Institute of Technology, Google Research, Carnegie Mellon University and National ICT Australia.

Kun Zhang

MBZUAI Professor Kun Zhang will co-chair the 38th Conference on Uncertainty in AI (UAI) Eindhoven, Netherlands, in August, 2022. He also co-chaired the Causal Learning and Reasoning (CLeaR) conference in April 2022, which was held in Eureka, California.

Zhang has joined MBZUAI as Associate Professor in the Machine Learning Department. He also maintains an associate professorship at Carnegie Mellon University. His research interests lie in machine learning and artificial intelligence, especially in causal discovery and causality-based learning.

He develops methods for automated causal discovery or causal representation learning from various kinds of data, investigates learning problems including transfer learning, representation learning, and deep learning from a causal view, and studies philosophical foundations of causation and various machine learning tasks. On the application side, he is interested in neuroscience, computer vision, computational finance, and climate analysis.

Preslav Nakov

Preslav Nakov is professor and acting deputy department chair in the MBZUAI Natural Language Processing Department. In 2022 he served as a program committee chair of ACL 2022. He was also a senior area chair for the 29th international conference on computational logistics (COLING) and the 2nd Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (AACL), as well as a workshop co-chair of the World Wide Web conference (WWW), in which MBZUAI Adjunct Professor Mérouane Debbah was also a keynote speaker.

Nakov’s research interests include computational linguistics and natural language processing, disinformation, propaganda, fake news and media bias detection, fact-checking, machine translation, question answering, sentiment analysis, lexical semantics, and biomedical text processing.

Before joining MBZUAI Nakov was a principal scientist at the Qatar Computing Research Institute, HBKU, a research fellow at the National University of Singapore, an honorary lecturer at Sofia University, and a researcher at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. He received a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of California at Berkeley supported by a Fulbright scholarship.

Nakov was named among the top 2% of the world’s most cited in the career achievement category, part of a global list by Stanford University. He also got an AI 2000 Most Influential Scholar Award (Honorable Mention) in the NLP category for (2011-2020). His research was featured in 100+ news outlets, including MIT Technology Review, CACM Research Highlights, Forbes, Boston Globe, Al Jazeera, Science Daily, Popular Science, Fast Company, The Register, WIRED, and Engadget.

Abdulmotaleb El Saddik

Abdulmotaleb El Saddik is the acting department chair of the MBZUAI Computer Vision Department and a professor of computer vision. In 2022 he served as general co-chair of the 2022 IEEE International Conference on Digital Twins, general co-chair of the 2022 IEEE International Conference on Computational Intelligence and Virtual Environments for Measurement Systems and Applications, and technical co-chair of IEEE International Conference on Multimedia Information Processing and Retrieval (MIPR).

Before joining MBZUAI, Professor Abdulmotaleb El Saddik served as a distinguished university professor and university research chair in the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Ottawa. His research focus is on the establishment of digital twins to enhance the quality of life of citizens using artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), SN, augmented reality (AR)/virtual reality (VR), haptics and 5G to allow people to interact in real-time with one another as well as with their smart digital representations in a secure manner.

El Saddik is the editor-in-chief of the ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing, Communications and Applications (ACM TOMM), senior associate editor of IEEE Multimedia (IEEE MM), and guest editor for several transactions and journals. He has co-authored 10 books and more than 600 publications as well as chaired more than 50 conferences and workshops.