Student becomes first from NI to graduate from University of Artificial Intelligence in Abu Dhabi

Written by Liam Tunney, originally published in Belfast Telegraph on December 7, 2022

A Co Derry man is to become the first student from Northern Ireland to graduate from a prestigious university of artificial intelligence in the Middle East.

Kevin Toner will be part of the inaugural batch of students to graduate from the recently-founded Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence in Abu Dhabi.

The Lavey man will receive a Masters in machine learning at the ceremony next Wednesday.

His interest in the area was sparked while studying computer science in Belfast.

“In final year at Queen’s, I studied a machine learning class and became really interested in it. A lot of the stuff we were doing kind of felt like magic,” he said.

“I was reading a book one night and it mentioned how machine learning was going to touch all aspects of life.

“I set it down and instantly said I wanted to do a masters in AI or machine learning.

“Initially I was thinking of Europe, but the deadlines had passed and eventually I came across this university.

“The more I looked at it, the more appealing it was. It had a nice tagline — the world’s first university of AI — and it seemed exciting.”

Moving halfway across the world would be daunting under normal circumstances, but Kevin also had to contend with the added complication of Covid-19.

“I arrived in November 2020, so we had to quarantine for 14 days, but they put us up in a hotel and gave us a goody bag, so I was impressed from the start,” said the 26-year-old.

“When I got out of quarantine, I was impressed by the country’s handling of Covid, because at home there was still lockdown.

“For me, being able to walk around and do stuff was just amazing. I remember Zooming people back at home and I had a haircut. They just assumed I had got it cut by another student, but it blew their mind that the hairdressers were still open.

“From the get-go, I thought it was amazing because I had been locked up for so long and could now go out and do stuff.”

The travelling did not faze Kevin, who previously studied in America and completed internships in both India and Poland. Though the only Irish student, the former St Patrick’s College Maghera pupil found himself in Abu Dhabi’s melting pot of diversity.

“The student population is quite diverse, which I really enjoyed. They mentioned it during applying and that’s one of the things that drew me,” he said.

“I enjoy meeting people from different countries and it was nice at the beginning to meet all these unique people from every continent. I was thinking the culture would be different and was thinking it mightn’t be easy, but I had no real issues.

“Everything was fine, but maybe because I’ve travelled so much already I’m a bit more adaptable.

“While I’ve been here, I’ve had a new-found appreciation for the culture and the local lifestyle.

“From talking to others, understanding and finding out more, I realise a lot of it is really cool and I understand it a lot more and appreciate it.”

The course itself focuses on using past data to train a model to make decisions, with Kevin using the example of securing a loan to explain it.

“Essentially you are trying to make predictions on new data. The past data will have labels — an example would be taking a loan out,” he said.

“You’d have all the different characteristics and maybe at the end if they do or don’t default on their loan.

“Whenever you get someone new, you’ll train the machine using the labels, and they could see gender, age, employment it can decide how likely they would be to default on their loan.

“One of the projects I worked on was face mask detection, detecting if an image of a face has a mask or not. A lot of my projects were about all sorts of things, including trying to predict stock prices in the future.”

The area of artificial intelligence is already well advanced in the United Arab Emirates, where the government is pushing hard to develop the technology.

Mohamed bin Zayed University was founded as part of that push, but with his graduation almost secured, Kevin is looking closer to home.

“I’m hoping to work at a games company based at home. I want to work in game development and data science, because they’re related,” he said.

“I would want to bring my Masters and use it as well. I want to use the computer science end — I want to program — and the machine learning side of working with data.

“I’m not really sure about the opportunities, but I plan to find somewhere. That’s the ambition for after I graduate.”