Student Focus: Abdullah Hamdi

About

KAUST Ph.D. student Abdullah Hamdi began his university studies at King Fahd University of Petroleum & Minerals (KFUPM) in the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia, where he specialized in electrical engineering. After graduating from KFUPM in 2016, he moved to KAUST for his master's degree ('18) and Ph.D. in electrical engineering, with a focus on artificial intelligence (AI), deep learning and computer vision. 

At KAUST, Hamdi is part of Associate Professor Bernard Ghanem's Image and Video Understanding Lab. Ghanem, a member of the University's Visual Computing Center, seeks to teach machines to see the world as humans do through computer vision. 

Hamdi's desire to disseminate knowledge on AI and use related technologies to develop the AI-ecosystem in the region spurred him to embark on his postgraduate education at the University.

According to Hamdi, AI can be defined as a set of techniques and programs with the goal of designing a machine capable of achieving a particular goal in a similar manner to humans. 

Hamdi noted that AI is not a substitute for the human brain. Deep learning, the most common AI technique used nowadays, can be fooled by "trivial" scenarios and doesn't yet have the capability to abstract and generalize concepts and knowledge it acquires from some specific tasks, on which it achieves superior performance.

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