MBZUAI team wins government communication competition

A team of graduate students from MBZUAI was awarded first place in a recent competition focused on sustainability in government communication. The University Challenge, organized by United Arab Emirates University, in collaboration with the Sharjah Government Communication Award, featured more than 20 teams from universities in the UAE and from the region.

The team was comprised of Salem Bin Saqer AlMarri, Hanoona Bangalath and Muhammad Maaz, Ph.D. students in computer vision at MBZUAI. The prize awarded for first place was 80,000 dirhams.

The team envisioned their project, named SawabAI, as a suite of applications that could be used to deter misinformation related to climate change, particularly misinformation that is generated by artificial intelligence.

“There is the risk that people who encounter fake news related to global warming could stop believing that climate change is real,” AlMarri said. With SawabAI, “a user could feed a variety of types of information into the platform, including text, image and video, to obtain a transparent evaluation of the data and whether it was generated by artificial intelligence or even learn about the source of the information.”

AlMarri said that during the competition and in preparation for their presentation, the team collaborated closely while drawing on their individual knowledge and experiences. “Our team combined our various areas of expertise, from research to technical know-how to experience working in the government sector,” he said.

Today, the study and development of artificial intelligence is marked both by a significant desire for new and more powerful tools and concerns related to how people may misuse these tools. As artificial intelligence becomes more pervasive in our world, there will be a greater need to identify misleading information that is generated by AI. “Our AI platform could be used to deter misinformation generated by other AI applications,” AlMarri said.