Prof. Francesca Gardini, Università di Pavia
Tuesday, April 30, 2024, 16:00
- 17:00
Building 1, Level 3, Room 3119
We will discuss the solution of eigenvalue problems associated with partial differential equations (PDE)s that can be written in the generalised form Ax = λMx, where the matrices A and/or M may depend on a scalar parameter. Parameter dependent matrices occur frequently when stabilised formulations are used for the numerical approximation of PDEs. With the help of classical numerical examples we will show that the presence of one (or both) parameters can produce unexpected results.
Prof. Edgard Pimentel
Tuesday, March 26, 2024, 16:00
- 17:00
Building 2, Level 5, Room 5220
Hessian-dependent functionals play a pivotal role in a wide latitude of problems in mathematics. Arising in the context of differential geometry and probability theory, this class of problems find applications in the mechanics of deformable media (mostly in elasticity theory) and the modelling of slow viscous fluids. We study such functionals from three distinct perspectives.
Tuesday, March 12, 2024, 15:30
- 17:30
B9, LH1, R2322
Contact Person
The seminars will be delivered in person by Jürgen Schmidhuber, Director of the KAUST AI Initiative, and will run weekly during the spring semester. The program will start with aspects of the theory of computation and delve into many topics not typically covered in a deep learning course. This is a truly unique opportunity to learn from one of the founders in artificial intelligence.
Prof. Silvia Bertoluzza
Tuesday, March 05, 2024, 16:00
- 17:00
Building 2, Level 5, Room 5209
We present a theoretical analysis of the Weak Adversarial Networks (WAN) method, recently proposed in [1, 2], as a method for approximating the solution of partial differential equations in high dimensions and tested in the framework of inverse problems. In a very general abstract framework.
Prof. Christof Schmidhuber, ZHAW School of Engineering
Tuesday, February 27, 2024, 16:00
- 17:00
Building 9, Level 2, Room 2322
Contact Person
Analogies between financial markets and critical phenomena have long been observed empirically. So far, no convincing theory has emerged that can explain these empirical observations. Here, we take a step towards such a theory by modeling financial markets as a lattice gas.
KAUST
Monday, February 19, 2024, 08:00
- 17:00
Building 19, Level 3, Halls 1, 2, and 3
Contact Person

Following the resounding success of our previous Annual "Rising Stars in AI" Symposia, including the 2022 and 2023 editions, the AI Initiative at KAUST (King Abdullah University of Science and Technology), located on the scenic Red Sea coast, is thrilled to announce the third installment of this Symposium, scheduled for February 19th to 21st, 2024.

Prof. Dr. Victorita Dolean, Mathematics and Computer Science, Scientific Computing, TU Eindhoven
Tuesday, February 06, 2024, 16:00
- 17:00
Building 2, Level 5, Room 5220
Contact Person
Wave propagation and scattering problems are of huge importance in many applications in science and engineering - e.g., in seismic and medical imaging and more generally in acoustics and electromagnetics.
Prof. Zhiming Chen, Academy of mathematics and Systems Science, Chinese Academy of Sciences
Wednesday, January 24, 2024, 14:30
- 16:00
Building 4, Level 5, Room 5220
Contact Person
In this short course, we will introduce some elements in deriving the hp a posteriori error estimate for a high-order unfitted finite element method for elliptic interface problems. The key ingredient is an hp domain inverse estimate, which allows us to prove a sharp lower bound of the hp a posteriori error estimator.
Tuesday, November 07, 2023, 10:00
- 11:00
Building 1, Level 4, Room 4214
Contact Person
Machine learning assumes a pivotal role in our data-driven world. The increasing scale of models and datasets necessitates quick and reliable algorithms for model training. This dissertation investigates adaptivity in machine learning optimizers.
Thursday, May 04, 2023, 07:30
- 09:00
KAUST
Contact Person
The growth of digital cameras and data communication has led to an exponential increase in video production and dissemination. As a result, automatic video analysis and understanding has become a crucial research topic in the computer vision community. However, the localization problem, which involves identifying a specific event in a large volume of data, particularly in long-form videos, remains a significant challenge.
Prof.Essam Mansour, Computer Science and Software Engineering, Concordia University
Monday, May 01, 2023, 12:00
- 13:00
Building 9, Level 2, Room 2325, Hall 2
Conversational AI and Question-Answering systems (QASs) for knowledge graphs (KGs) are both emerging research areas: they empower users with natural language interfaces for extracting information efficiently and effectively. While Conversational AI simulates human-like conversations, its effectiveness is limited by the available training data. However, QASs retrieve the most up-to-date information from KGs by translating natural language queries into formal queries that the database engine can process. In this talk, we examine the characteristics of existing approaches for combining Conversational AI and QASs to create novel KG chatbots. We also introduce KGQAn, a universal QA system that can be applied to any KG without the need for customization.
Monday, February 06, 2023, 12:00
- 13:00
Building 9, Level 2, Room 2325, Hall 2
Contact Person
In this work we focus our attention on distributed optimization problems in the context where the communication time between the server and the workers is non-negligible. We obtain novel methods supporting bidirectional compression (both from the server to the workers and vice versa) that enjoy new state-of-the-art theoretical communication complexity for convex and nonconvex problems.
Dr. Nazneen Rajani, Research Lead, Hugging Face, California
Sunday, December 11, 2022, 14:00
- 15:00
Building 2, Level 5, Room 5220
Contact Person
Are commercial APIs from Microsoft, Google, and Amazon for NLP tasks any better than rule-based systems? Is documentation for LLMs accessible to non-expert users in the industry? Our work on creating a unified toolkit for evaluation (robustness gym) and reporting (interactive model cards) attempts to address these questions.
Dr.Syed Adnan Yusuf
Monday, November 28, 2022, 12:00
- 13:00
Building 9, Level 2, Room 2322, Hall 1
This seminar focuses on providing the audience with the context and scope of our internship program. The program is for the young and talented graduate students with an active interest in solving real-world problems. Some of the projects that will be presented in the seminar are actively developed in Elm and include domains such as computer vision, robotics and automation, healthcare, IoT, video analytics, and NLP. The seminar will serve as a launch pad to allow students to discuss their future interests and aspirations with the speaker. It will also enable them to develop a better awareness of domains more relevant to their future research aspirations.
Francesco Orabona, Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Boston University
Monday, November 14, 2022, 12:00
- 13:00
Building 9, Level 2, Room 2322
Contact Person
Parameter-free online optimization is a class of algorithms that does not require tuning hyperparameters, yet they achieve the theoretical optimal performance. Moreover, they often achieve state-of-the-art performance too. An example would be gradient descent algorithms completely without learning rates. In this talk, I review my past and present contributions to this field. Building upon a fundamental idea connecting optimization, gambling, and information theory, I discuss selected applications of parameter-free algorithms to machine learning and statistics. Finally, we conclude with an overview of the future directions of this field.
Prof.Evgeny Burnaev, Applied AI Center, Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology
Monday, October 24, 2022, 12:00
- 13:00
Building 9, Level 2, Room 2322, Hall 1
Contact Person
Skoltech Applied AI center’s mission is to create AI models and frameworks for solving the problems of sustainable development of industry and economy. In my presentation, I will overview the current center's activities, applied and fundamental problem statements, and corresponding recent results.
Prof. Dhabaleswar K. (DK) Panda, Professor, Computer Science and Engineering, The Ohio State University
Monday, September 26, 2022, 12:00
- 13:00
Building 9, Level 2, Room 2322, Hall 1
Contact Person
This talk will focus on challenges and opportunities in designing middleware for HPC, AI (Deep/Machine Learning), and Data Science. We will start with the challenges in designing runtime environments for MPI+X programming models by considering support for multi-core systems, high-performance networks (InfiniBand and RoCE), GPUs, and emerging BlueField-2 DPUs. Features and sample performance numbers of using the MVAPICH2 libraries will be presented. For the Deep/Machine Learning domain, we will focus on MPI-driven solutions to extract performance and scalability for popular Deep Learning frameworks (TensorFlow and PyTorch), large out-of-core models, and Bluefield-2 DPUs.
Fahad Khan, Associate Professor at MBZUAI and Linköping University
Monday, September 19, 2022, 12:00
- 13:00
Building 9, Level 2, Room 2322
Contact Person
Machine perception that corresponds to the ability to understand the visual world based on the input from sensors, such as cameras is one of the central problems in Artificial Intelligence. To this end, recent years have witnessed tremendous progress in various instance-level recognition tasks having real-world applications in e.g., robotics, autonomous driving and surveillance. In this talk, I will first present our recent results towards understanding state-of-the-art deep learning-based visual recognition networks in terms of their robustness and generalizability. Next, I will present our results on learning visual recognition models with limited human supervision. Finally, I will discuss moving one step further from instance-level recognition to understand visual relationships between object pairs.
Guodong Zhang, PhD student in University of Toronto
Sunday, February 20, 2022, 15:00
- 16:00
KAUST
Contact Person
In this talk, I will discuss how the use of second-order information – e.g, curvature or covariance – can help in all three problems, yet with vastly different roles in each. First, I will present a noisy quadratic model, which qualitatively predicts scaling properties of a variety of optimizers and in particular suggests that second-order optimization algorithms would extend perfect scaling to much bigger batches. Second, I will show how we can derive and implement scalable and flexible Bayesian inference algorithms from standard second-order optimization algorithms. Third, I will describe a novel second-order algorithm that finds desired equilibria and save us from converging to spurious fixed points in two-player sequential games (i.e. bilevel optimization) or even more general settings. Finally, I will conclude how my research would pave the way towards intelligent machines that can learn from data and experience efficiently, reason about their own decisions, and act in our interests.
Jinchao Xu, Affiliate Professor of Information Sciences and Technology, Penn State University
Wednesday, October 13, 2021, 09:00
- 10:00
Building 9, level 2, Room # 2322
Contact Person
I will give a self-contained introduction to the theory of the neural network function class and its application to image classification and numerical solution of partial differential equations.
Jinchao Xu, Affiliate Professor of Information Sciences and Technology, Penn State University
Tuesday, October 12, 2021, 09:00
- 10:00
BW BUILDING 4 AND 5 Level: 0 Room: AUDITORIUM 0215
Contact Person
I will give a self-contained introduction to the theory of the neural network function class and its application to image classification and numerical solution of partial differential equations.
Jinchao Xu, Affiliate Professor of Information Sciences and Technology, Penn State University
Monday, October 11, 2021, 09:00
- 10:00
BW BUILDING 4 AND 5 Level: 0 Room: AUDITORIUM 0215
Contact Person
I will give a self-contained introduction to the theory of the neural network function class and its application to image classification and numerical solution of partial differential equations.