The worlds largest democracy is poised to transform itself and the world, embracing AI on an enormous scale.

Speaking with the press Friday in Bengaluru, in the context of announcements from two of Indias largest conglomerates, Reliance Industries Limited and Tata Group, NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang detailed plans to bring AI technology and skills to address the worlds most populous nations greatest challenges.

I think this is going to be one of the largest AI markets in the world, said Huang, who was wrapping up a week of high-level meetings across the nation, including with Prime Minister Narendra Modi, leading AI researchers, top business leaders, members of the press and the countrys 4,000-some NVIDIA employees.

The companies will work together to create an AI computing infrastructure and platforms for developing AI solutions. It will be based on NVIDIA technology like the NVIDIA GH200 Grace Hopper Superchip and NVIDIA DGX Cloud.

GH200 marks a fundamental shift in computing architecture that provides exceptional performance and massive memory bandwidth, while DGX Cloud, an AI supercomputing service in the cloud, makes it easier for enterprises to train their employees in AI technology, access the technology internally and provide generative AI services to customers.

In his exchange with more than a dozen of Indias top tech journalists following the announcement, Huang said computer science expertise is a core competency for India, and that with access to technology and capital India is poised to build AI to be able to solve challenges at home and abroad.

You have the data, you have the talent, Huang said. We are open for business and bring great expertise on building supercomputers.

During the freewheeling back and forth with the media, Huang emphasized Indias strength in information technology and the potential for AI to accelerate the development of the nations IT industry.

IT is one of your natural resources. You produce it at an incredible scale. Youre incredibly good at it. You export it all over the world, Huang said.

Earlier, after meeting with many of the regions top technology leaders including startup pioneers, AI proponents, and key players in Indias digital public infrastructure Huang hailed Indias moment, saying the nation is on the cusp of becoming a global AI powerhouse.

While India has well-known technical capabilities distinguished technical universities, 2,500 engineering colleges and an estimated 1.5 million engineers many of its 1.4 billion people, located across sprawling metropolitan areas and some 650,000 villages, collectively speaking dozens of languages, have yet to fully benefit from this progress.

Applied in the Indian context, AI can help rural farmers interact via cell phones in their local language to get weather information and crop prices. It can help provide, at a massive scale, expert diagnosis of medical symptoms and imaging scans where doctors may not be immediately available. It can better predict cyclonic storms using decades of atmospheric data, enabling those at risk to more quickly evacuate and find shelter.

Reliance Industries and Tata Communications will build and operate state-of-the-art AI supercomputing data centers based on such technology, utilizing it for internal AI development and infrastructure-as-a-service for Indias AI researchers, companies and burgeoning AI startup ecosystem.

That effort, Huang said, during his conversation with the Indian technology press, promises to be part of a process that will turn India into a beacon for AI technology.

AI could be built in India, used in India, and exported from India, Huang said.

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NVIDIA Partners With India Giants to Advance AI in World's Most ... - Nvidia

Courtesy of Khoa Luu

One of the presentations at CVPR 2023

The annual conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, CVPR 2023, in Vancouver, Canada, attracted global attention tovarious uses of artificial intelligence, drawing over 1,000 attendees from more than 75 countries.

Khoa Luu, assistant professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and area chair of the main conference, said, "This is one of the frontier AI conferences. This is why it attracts a lot of tech companies like Google, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, et cetera," he said. "These companies see emerging technologies and next generation AI products within this conference and attract a lot of research and scientists."

The conference received over 9,000 submissions, with 2,359 papers ultimately accepted for presentation. The U of A had a notable presence at CVPR 2023. Its doctoral students showcased their work at the main conference and in several workshops.

Naga VS Raviteja Chappa, a Ph.D. student, achieved third place at the best paper competition of the ninth International Workshop on Computer Vision in Sports. Xuan-Bac Nguyen, also a Ph.D. student, received the prestigious best reviewer award at the main conference. These students also served as panelists to review other submissions to the main conference.

Luu expressed his commitment to encouraging student participation in conferences.

"I do my best to secure grants and encourage graduate students to attend this conference," Luu said. "I do this so they can learn how to become professional researchers in the future. This conference gives them the opportunity to meet corporate attendees, communicate and interact with professionals in the industry. Our students often just stay in the computer lab creating code during their academic careers. They need to reach out and, you know, see and feel the beautiful insights and desires within the industry. It is more than just coding or being a robot machine. They need to see how things are applied and practiced. They need to learn how to present in a professional way and how to communicate with other people. I think this is a critical skill for a graduate student. They can learn this from the conference, and they must learn that they cannot just stay in the lab."

To facilitate student participation, various grants and sponsorships played a pivotal role. Luu expressed his gratitude to the sponsors, including the U of A, for supporting the students' research and enabling their enriching experiences at CVPR 2023.

Not only did Luu serve as the area chair for the main conference, he also was the co-organizer of the CVPR 2023 Precognition Workshop. He did this in collaboration with Aurora Innovation Inc., Google Research, Carnegie Mellon University, University of Houston and HKUST (Guangzhou).

Luu would like to give special thanks to all those who collaborated and sponsors:

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition 2024 will be held June 17-21, 2024, at the Seattle Convention Center.

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Engineering Professor Helps Head Up Successful 'Frontier' Artificial Intelligence Conference - University of Arkansas Newswire

L to R: Oliver Hawk Holden, Jonathan Bachrach and Joshua Hashemzadeh at the new art gallery 120710, which opened in July 2023. The plywood walls match the spaces experimental theme. Courtesy: Jonathan Bachrach

Berkeley artist and former Cal computer science professor Jonathan Bachrach opened experimental art gallery 120710 to create a space where artists could take risks without the pressures of commercial galleries. The gallery, which hopes to close the gap between art school and selective commercial galleries, does not take a cut from artists proceeds and is currently funded by a combination of Bachrachs own savings and donations.

120710, named after the gallerys address on Tenth Street in Berkeley, opened in July. Its inaugural exhibition, Working Craft, which focuses on the intersection of commercial craft aesthetics and traditional art production, closes Saturday.

Berkeleyside asked Bachrach a few questions about his work. This interview has been condensed and edited.

What inspired you to open 120710?

While a researcher at MIT, I started an art collective involving scientists and artists, called Collision Collective, and curated about a dozen shows, called Collisions. A number of the people in the collective went on to make art their full-time profession to some extent because of the experience. I was one of those artists. It was one of the best things I did in my life and it taught me that in order to succeed in art, you need to try out a lot of ideas, practice showing your work, have a professional venue to show in and have a community to celebrate and discuss your work.

One big problem in the art world today is that there arent enough galleries to show work, and of those, they are mostly commercial and as such need to sell work. The pressures of commercial galleries make it difficult to find your voice as an artist. Its also quite difficult to break into commercial galleries because there are so few of them. There really is a gap between art school and commercial galleries.

I really wanted the name of the gallery to be open-ended but situated and the address fits the bill. I noticed that we are located on Tenth Street and really liked the combination of the street address and the street name.

120710 is located in Berkeleys Gilman District, which is home to quite a few fine arts galleries. What about the space made you decide to open there?

I live nearby in Westbrae and had fallen in love with the area and knew I really wanted to create an art space here. I love the quirky and industrial character of the area including 924 Gilman Street, the skatepark, galleries, breweries, wineries, restaurants, shops, Urban Adamah, etc. I feel like we are most like 924 Gilman in our mission to promote the growth of emerging artists and non-mainstream genres and to make art accessible to a wide range of people.

Youve said that you want this space to provide interesting discourse for the community and take underrepresented creative practices and provide platforms for them. Could you expand on what you mean by that?

Mostly we wanted to challenge artists to try new things and practice making art and provide a higher profile gallery that rewards them for their attempts and gives them feedback from an audience that enjoys witnessing risk-taking in art. There are big pressures of showing in commercial galleries and we wanted to build a creative safe house where risk-taking is celebrated.

Were really thinking about going beyond the traditional flat painting of everyday subject matter. Were thinking of new media, experiments in combinations of mediums, novel subject matter, new styles of interactions with an audience, etc. I want to emphasize that its not necessarily an absolute, but potentially relative term for an artist and curator to interpret for themselves. Hopefully, artists will inspire each other through their experiments.

I find it really interesting that 120710 is a non-commercial art gallery. Youve said that 100% of the revenue goes to the artists, so how exactly does the funding for the gallery work?

Initially, I have been funding it myself but will work towards being funded fully through donations moving forward. Im thinking of creating a donation-based funding model built around web technology inspired by Kickstarter, GoFundMe, Patreon, but domain-specific to an art gallery. I feel that this creates a tangible mechanism for donors to participate in the production of art shows and artists. That said, our gallery is as experimental as the art we show. The gallery and its platform are art pieces in and of themselves, and we will evolve and grow based on feedback from our stakeholders.

I noticed that youre also listed as a professor in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences department at Cal. Which came first: your interest in art, or your interest in programming? How did these two interests intersect?

While at Cal, I did research in novel design tools and taught computational design and fabrication. For what its worth, I am no longer a professor but am focusing instead on a startup and on art making and showing. I do though want to build a relationship with faculty and students at the university and have already started those conversations.

As far as my background goes, Ive always been making art.My mother was an artist, and I was an art minor in college. I was Harold Cohens artistic assistant as an undergrad at UC San Diego for most of my years and summers there. Harold was one of the earliest artists to use computers and even artificial intelligence.

Since then, I have always used art to push my scientific research. In fact, I would go so far as to say that my research only really took off when I started driving it through the lens of making art. Despite my personal use of technology in art, 120710 is open to all genres of art.

120710s inaugural exhibit, Working Craft, opened on July 15. Can you tell us about the exhibit and how you came up with the theme? How did you go about selecting artists featured in the gallery?

My collaborator Josh Hashemzadeh asked his San Francisco Art Institute friend Oliver Hawk Holden to curate our first show and we told Oliver that we wanted experimental art. Oliver came up with the theme of experimental craft and chose all the artists and works of theirs that most represented the gallerys theme. There are 38 artists in the show and 55 distinct artworks. The show will be up until the closing on Aug. 5.

Is there anything else youd like to share with us?

I put up plywood walls around the gallery which matches the theme of experimentation. For the current show, the curator, Oliver, decided to build plywood shelves for showing volumetric art.

The space is open 12-4 p.m. Saturdays and 12-6 p.m. Mondays, Thursdays, and Fridays by appointment by emailing info@120710.art. There is no entry fee. More information is available on the website 120710.art and you can follow us as @120710.art on Instagram.

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'A creative safe house': Former Cal computer science professor opens experimental art gallery in West Berkeley - Berkeleyside

Using artificial intelligence, scientists at the Chesapeake Conservancy were able to track the increasing number of large solar arrays in the Chesapeake Bay watershed. Image courtesy of the Chesapeake Conservancy.

The mere mention of artificial intelligence inspires a lot of dread and wonder in the general populace.

Yet its an overbroad subject. AI can mean anything from self-driving cars to facial recognition technology. Robots that perform unenviable tasks to new mashups of popular songs. Enhanced fraud detection at banks to deep video fakes meant to dupe the public.

I cant think of any endeavor where AI in some ways cant be helpful, said Anupam Joshi, chair of the Computer Science and Electrical Engineering Department at the University of Maryland Baltimore County. And as you think about AI, theres a lot of hype around this.

But a number of academics, scientists, intellectuals and environmentalists in Maryland are starting to buy the hype in at least one critical way: AI, they believe, may be able to help protect the worlds land, air and water and could help to mitigate climate change.

In the last couple of years theres been a lot of excitement about AI, a lot of fear about AI, said Joel Dunn, president and CEO of the Chesapeake Conservancy, an Annapolis-based regional conservation nonprofit. Theres really no doubt that its touching every part of our livesIt comes with some controversy as we come to understand how AI will change society as we know it. But what some people may not know is that AI may have the potential to save the planet, including right here in the Chesapeake Bay region.

The concept is hardly new: After all, WALL-E, a popular animated movie from 2008, featured a robot who traveled a desecrated Earth, cleaning up humans environmental messes.

Today, at its most basic level, AI is helping climate scientists and meteorologists with the rudiments of their profession.

Our ability to predict the weather has vastly improved over the last decade, and a big reason is machine learning, said Tim Finin, another computer science and electrical engineering professor at UMBC, who, like Joshi, was testifying at a state legislative hearing on AI earlier this summer.

When policy experts talk about using AI to help the environment, they arent talking about the latest and hottest and most controversial iteration, known as ChatGPT. Thats anAI-powered language model, capable of generating human-like text based on context, past conversations and prior writing samples.

Click here to read more from our Climate Calling series.

This AI stuff is not as new as everyone is making it out to be, said Andrew J. Elmore, a professorof landscape ecologyat the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science, who just completed a project mapping forestland in Pennsylvania, using artificial intelligence.

In a recent conversation with reporters at the states Wye Island Natural Resources Management Area, where he announced a new state plan for monitoring the Chesapeake Bays health, Gov. Wes Moore (D) said AI may become part of Marylands climate solutions strategy.

Being able to understand the role that AI is going to be able to playis important, and its something our administration is going to move very deliberately on, he said.

The Chesapeake Conservancy is regularly putting the application to the test. It is perhaps the leading institution in Maryland thats using AI for climate research and advocacy though it is by no means the only one. The organization has recently completed two projects that conservancy leaders believe can be extrapolated in unlimited ways. One relied on models the conservancys researchers developed to map waterways in discreet areas. The other tracked large solar energy installations and offered predictions for where future solar arrays may be sited.

Last year, using deep computing, conservancy researchers helped the Harry R. Hughes Center for Agro-Ecology on the Eastern Shore compile a comprehensive look at Marylands disappearing forestlands and tree canopy. The study resulted this year in the first meaningful forest protection legislation in the General Assembly in decades.

Theres this acknowledgement that we need to leverage new approaches in technology and financing and application to advance the movement, Dunn said. And AI and machine learning are one component of that, and a major component of that.

Mapping of waterways, of course, is not a new exercise. The National Wetlands Inventory, overseen by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, has existed for decades. The agency produces and distributes maps and other geospatial data on wetland and deepwater habitats and monitors changes in those habitats over time, using photographs, satellite technology and other data.

But at a time when federal and state officials, farmers, ranchers, scientists, corporate leaders and environmentalists cannot even agree on what actually constitutes a body of water and have been slugging out their differences in legislative debates and through litigation Chesapeake Conservancy has sought a more aggressive and comprehensive survey. A decade ago, the conservancycreated the Conservation Innovation Center, and began raising money to hire scientists to run it.

That was a conscious effort to leverage emerging technologies, particularly geographic imaging systems and cloud-based computing to help us develop better data to make better decisions, Dunn said.

When it came to mapping wetlands, conservancy scientists trained a machine-learning neural network model for high-resolution wetland mapping with publicly available data from Mille Lacs County, Minn., a region north of the Twin Cities with abundant lakes and rivers; Kent County, Del., which lies along the Delaware Bay; and St. Lawrence County, N.Y., which is partly in the Adirondack Park and features the St. Lawrence River and several other significant waterways. Using three different technologies (AI, remote sensing data from satellites, and cloud computing), researchers were able to map the waterways in the three counties including assessing where water bodies had been before they disappeared or were covered up by construction projects at a very high accuracy rate of 94%.

Its pretty unusual for an organization of our size to have that level of integration, said Mike Evans, Chesapeake Conservancys senior data scientist. It puts us at the forefront of what conservation organizations are doing.

AI helped the Chesapeake Conservancy map wetlands in three U.S. counties. This graphic shows areas where the training data (in green) did not map a wetland, but where the conservancys model correctly mapped that a wetland is present (in purple). This is likely an area here a wetland has been restored. Photo courtesy of the Chesapeake Conservancy.

The study results werepublishedin the Science of the Total Environment, an academic journal, which gave the Chesapeake Conservancy researchers a great deal of satisfaction and peer-reviewed validation. And the scientists believe what they found in the three counties can be extrapolated to the entire Chesapeake Bay region. They have shared the results with the leaders of the Chesapeake Bay Program, the regional partnership of federal, state and local officials that has been working on Bay clean-up for the past four decades.

Its a great example of how you can leverage better data to make better policy, Dunn said. The wetlands are like the kidneys of the Chesapeake Bay. Theyre crucial to maintaining and restoring critical parts of the bay. So were really excited to add this tool and data to the decision framework for the community moving forward.

The technology exists to map this data in ways we couldnt do before

The Chesapeake Conservancy solar array study sought to map where big solar installations have been placed throughout the six Bay watershed states Maryland, Virginia, Delaware, West Virginia, Pennsylvania and New York. Using the AI technology was essential, conservancy leaders said, because its hard to distinguish solar arrays from bodies of water and runoff on impervious surfaces on standard satellite images. So the AI mapping enabled researchers to not only see where the solar installations are, but also to project where they are likely to wind up in the future. The results were published in Biological Conservation, a scientific journal.

It was a challenge that lent itself to the strengths of AI so it made a lot of sense, Evans said. Theres this need for the data. The technology exists to map this data in ways we couldnt do before. So that is really a nice example of the sweet spot where AI can really make a difference in the conservation space.

Using artificial intelligence, scientists at the Chesapeake Conservancy were able to track the increasing number of large solar arrays in the Chesapeake Bay watershed. Photo courtesy of the Chesapeake Conservancy.

Evans presented the conclusions at a clean water conference in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, earlier this year. He said some conservation leaders were dismayed seeing the projections that a number of large solar projects are inevitably going to wind up on land that environmental groups are trying to protect.

You could hear some grumbles in the audience, Evans recalled, because people didnt like seeing their area lit up as a high probability solar place, and my comment is, If you dont like how this map looks, good. Now is the time to do something about it. This is what we think will happen if the status quo continues.

Moving ahead, the conservancy is in the early stages of a project thats using AI to map the biodiversity of the Chesapeake Bay region. Kumar Mainali, a data scientist who is heading the research, said the group aims to track the distribution of hundreds of species and pinpoint suitable habitats for each species throughout the region, so that we can manage and conserve them efficiently.

To do anything, first we need the data about the species, Mainali said.

The AI will enable researchers to home in and observe smaller species, using aresolution thats 1,000 times finer than conventional mapping.

Its a multi-year project, Mainali said. I have completed modeling about 10 species so far.

Mapping Pennsylvania forests and the undersea world

Chesapeake Conservancy researchers arent the only people in Maryland using AI to make environmental inquiries.

Elmore, the professor at the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science Appalachian Laboratory in Frostburg, just finished his project mapping forestland in Pennsylvania, but it has yet to be published. UMCES was hired for the job by the Natural Resources Conservation Service, a division of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which is interested in managing forests to maximize bird habitat.

Elmore said the state of Pennsylvania does a good job of keeping track of where forests are harvested on public land, but struggles to monitor what is taking place on private lands. UMCES researchers used photos and data taken from airplane radar and combined it with what was known about logging activity on public lands to hypothesize whats been happening around the state.

It really helped that the state kept such great training data on public lands, Elmore said. The researchers basic conclusions: People on private lands in some cases follow best practices, but in other cases, they dont. On some private lands theyll just come along and harvest the most valuable trees.

Eventually, UMCES wants to model the bird habitat itself in the Pennsylvania forests.

We want to know where the birds are, but what we really want to know is where the created habitat is, Elmore said. The goal eventually is to give people tools to know what is the best treatment you can get for bird habitat.

UMCES will turn over its data to the Natural Resources Conservation Service, but will also offer the federal government options for how to best preserve, protect and extend bird habitat in Pennsylvania, based on what the researchers found.

The opportunities are pretty wide open if we can identify those situations that are really valuable and unique for mapping conservation, Elmore said.

Meanwhile, a Johns Hopkins University professor has recently brought his longtime expertise using AI to study the ocean floor to classrooms and research institutes in Baltimore.

James Bellingham is a pioneer in the field of autonomous marine robotics who has led research expeditions from the Arctic to the Antarctic and is now executive director of Hopkins Institute for Assured Autonomy. Bellingham has spent decades developing and employing autonomous underwater vehicles for research, through high-level positions at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution on Cape Cod and at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute in California, among other institutions.

Bellingham said research of marine life and weather conditions has always been years behind the ability to probe what takes place on dry land or in the sky, calling the conditions miles beneath the oceans surface an observational challenge. Much of what takes place in the ocean is opaque to most satellite systems and opaque to radio frequency, he said.

Bellingham and his colleagues have developed autonomous vehicles that can spend up to six hours at a time on the ocean floor, collecting data. But what theyve discovered over the years is that transmitting information from the sea floor to the surface is a major challenge. Initially, they would bring the vehicle up to the surface and spend six hours downloading the information it had collected. But they came to realize that given the volatile conditions at the bottom of the ocean, by the time they were able to observe the data they were no longer doing so in real time.

We did a terrible job, though it was better than anything else you could do, Bellingham said. In the ocean, it takes a long time to get stuff to work.

What Bellingham and his collaborators have developed more recently is an autonomous vehicle with communications systems capable of transmitting data to researchers at the surface in real time, likening the process to sending and receiving text messages. What theyre attempting to measure is how conditions at the bottom of the sea are affecting the biology and chemistry of the ocean, the life that currently exists there and vice-versa. Its a less obvious and visible aspect of climate change.

Theyre beginning to tease apart how these organisms are being shaped by the environment theyre in and how theyre shaping the environment, Bellingham said. Some people think were moving to an ocean that doesnt exist today. Theres a zillion hypotheses for what might happen.

A legislative response?

At a recent conference of state environmental regulators in Washington, D.C., AI was a frequent topic of discussion. Amanda Lefevre, the deputy commissioner at the Kentucky Department for the Environment, said environmental work is a really good application for AI.

You can run lots of scenarios, thousands of different scenarios, in thousands of different ways, she said. But she also joked about the technologys prevalence. I may not have a job in two months.

Colby Manwaring, vice president of Innovyze, a tech company in Portland, Ore., that develops software for water infrastructure companies, told the state officials that in his view, AI can only go so far in deconstructing environmental conditions and challenges.

We dont always need AI, he said. We always have a lot of analytics tools and planning and operational tools. AI can help optimize some of that.

Manwaring said that AI cant, for example, tell someone how much its going to rain on any given day because forecasts can only be so precise.

Incomplete data is a fact of everyones life, he said. Its never as complete as you want.

And AI continues to raise fears in society and is drawing more scrutiny from lawmakers across the country, inspiring 80 separate bills in state legislatures across the country this year, Quinn Laking, a University of Maryland School of Law student who has been researching AI for the University of Maryland Center for Health and Homeland Security, testified at a legislative hearing recently.

Its definitely the new hot topic, she said.

Maryland is no exception. The legislatures Joint Committee on Cybersecurity, Information Technology, and Biotechnology, held the first of two public hearings on AI in late June. It was a general survey about the applications of AI, with an array of experts and scholars speaking. The committees co-chairs, Sen. Katie Fry Hester (D-Howard) and Del. Anne Kaiser (D-Montgomery), said the panel would discuss potential legislation for overseeing AI in the state at a hearing in October.

Its past time for there being some kind of legislative framework, Kaiser said.

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Can AI save the planet? Some Marylanders are trying to make the ... - Maryland Matters

Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI) has established two new departments and four associated graduate programs dedicated to robotics and computer science, catering to the surging global demand for these disciplines, which is expected to hit USD $225 billionand $140 billion, respectively, by 2030.

The new departments will complement the universitys existing computer vision (CV), machine learning (ML), and natural language processing (NLP) departments, which are ranked among the top 20 globally by CSRankings, and will act as academic homes for new faculty, researchers and postdoctoral fellows, and students in robotics and computer science.

Aligned with the formation of the new departments, the university has launched mastersand Ph.D. programs in robotics and computer science. The new programs will help further develop the UAEs wider artificial intelligence (AI) ecosystem and strengthen its position as an international hub for AI research and innovation.

MBZUAI President and University Professor, Eric Xing, said The addition of these two new departments represents MBZUAIs lasting effort in developing a solid foundation for research excellence and innovation in artificial intelligence. The university will continue to bring into Abu Dhabi world leading faculty and researchers in the fields and to empower students to become pioneers with highly sought-after skills in developing advanced AI tools and applications across industries. Given the digital renAIssance we find ourselves in, skills in these disciplines are in high demand.

The Robotics Department will focus on rigorous, high-impact, original research, emphasizing robot learning and robot algorithms rather than the development of new robot hardware. Topics of interest include deep learning, control theory, robot manipulation, quadruped locomotion, human-robot interaction, robot-assisted surgery and healthcare, swarm robotics, precision agriculture, and environment and infrastructure monitoring.

Robotics is a transformative technology, revolutionizing sectors such as manufacturing, healthcare, agriculture, and transportation. Research indicates strong demand for robotics expertise in the coming years, with the robotics technology market expected to surpass US$225.6 billion in value by 2030. This demand will be critically hampered by a predicted global talent shortage, with up to 85 million jobs potentially going unfilled by 2030 due to a lack of skilled people to fill them.

Meanwhile, the Computer Science Department will provide unparalleled depth in the foundational technologies that have given rise to the phenomenal growth and impact of IT in the last four decades, also with a focus on entrepreneurship and sustainability. The global computer science job market is booming, with projections of a 14.5% CAGR from 2021 to 2027 and an estimated 3.5 million jobs by 2026; the program will help cater to the high demand for advanced computer science skills, both in the UAE and beyond.

The masters programs in computer science and robotics will take two years, including a compulsory six-week internship, while the Ph.D. will take four years, including a compulsory three-month internship. The programs dual focus on academic research and industry engagement is designed to provide students with world-leading theoretical and applied skills, bringing maximum impact to the UAE.

MBZUAI Acting Provost, Professor Timothy Baldwin, said MBZUAI is at the forefront of AI education and research, making our programs distinctive and globally competitive. Our Computer Science Department will be an academic home for faculty, researchers, and students in fundamental computing topics, with the masters and Ph.D. offering extraordinary technical depth and very strict entry criteria. The Robotics Department will focus on human-centered and autonomous robotics research, as well as the development of the next generation of robotics practitioners with deep skills in both AI and robotics, supporting careers at the cutting edge of academia, industry, and government. Mandatory internships ensure that our students graduate well prepared to drive technological progress, whichever path or sector they choose.

Currently, there are no comparable programs available in the UAE, allowing MBZUAI to distinguish itself and position the UAE as a global AI leader. The two departments will also serve to highlight the interdisciplinary nature of AI, combining computer science and robotics with domains such as CV, ML, and NLP.

Applications for the 2024 admissions year will open on September 1, 2023.

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MBZUAI launches dedicated robotics and computer science ... - My Startup World