News

September 2019

• 

  Relishing the ‘McLaren experience’ at the 2019 Formula 1 Bahrain Grand Prix

  1 min read · Sun, Sep 29 2019

  News

  student focus sensors

  Altynay Kaidarova is a Ph.D. student in electrical engineering based in the University's Computer, Electrical and Mathematical Science & Engineering division.
• 

  The NANOVIS team wins the 1st Place in Graph Drawing Contest 2019

  1 min read · Thu, Sep 26 2019

  News

  visualization graph drawing

  The NANOVIS team has won the 1st Place in Graph Drawing Contest 2019 under the category of "Creative Topic #2 Meal Ingredients" on their graph "Worldmap of Food". The contest took place in the 27th International Symposium on Graph Drawing and Network Visualization (GD'19) that was held from September 17 to 20, 2019 in Průhonice/Prague, Czechia. Check the full poster:
• 

  Three papers with contributions from the NANOVIS team will be presented at IEEE VIS

  1 min read · Wed, Sep 25 2019

  News

  visualization

  Three papers with contributions from the NANOVIS team will be presented at IEEE VIS 2019 that will be held from 20 to 25 October 2019 in Vancouver, Canada. Multi-Scale Procedural Animations of Microtubule Dynamics Based on Measured Data ScaleTrotter: Illustrative Visual Travels across Negative Scales Data-aware Continuous Colormap Refinement for 2D Scalar Field Visualization IEEE VIS 2019 is the premier forum for advances in visualization for academia, government, and industry. This week-long event brings together researchers and practitioners with a shared interest in visualization.
• 

  KAUST Ph.D. student receives environmetrics best poster award

  1 min read · Tue, Sep 24 2019

  News Spotlight

  Environmental Statistics

  Ghulam Qadir, a third-year Ph.D. student in KAUST Associate Professor Ying Sun's Environmental Statistics research group, recently received a best poster award from the Italian Environmetrics Society (GRASPA) and the International Environmetrics Society (TIES) at the GRASPA 2019 conference held from July 15 to 16 in Pescara, Italy.
• 

  Honing in on hotspots in spatial data

  1 min read · Sun, Sep 15 2019

  News

  statistics Environmental Statistics

  More accurate detection of hotspot clusters provides new insights into the behavior of air pollution.
• 

  KAUST Professor Peter Richtárik wins Distinguished Speaker Award

  1 min read · Sun, Sep 15 2019

  Awards Spotlight News

  optimization machine learning big data

  Peter Richtárik, KAUST professor of computer science, recently received a Distinguished Speaker Award at the Sixth International Conference on Continuous Optimization (ICCOPT 2019) held in Berlin from August 3 to 8. ICCOPT 2019 was organized by the Mathematical Optimization Society and was hosted this year by the Weierstrass Institute for Applied Analysis and Stochastics.
• 

  Marc Genton received an ISI Service Award 2019

  1 min read · Sun, Sep 15 2019

  Awards Spotlight News

  statistics visualization computational predictions

  Marc Genton, Chair and Distinguished Professor of the Statistics Program of KAUST and Head of the Spatio-Temporal Statistics and Data Science Research Group, received an International Statistical Institute (ISI) Service Award 2019 for his efforts and leadership as Editor-in-Chief of the journal Stat. Professor Genton received his award at the Awards Ceremony during the World Statistical Congress (WSC) 2019 held in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, 18-23 August 2019.
• 

  Aditya Prabaswara's Ph.D. Dissertation Defense

  1 min read · Thu, Sep 12 2019

  News

  ​Study of III-nitride Nanowire Growth and Devices on Unconventional Substrates​
• 

  Database to support infectious disease research

  1 min read · Wed, Sep 11 2019

  News

  machine learning artificial intelligence human health Computer science

  Linking disease pathogens to clinical signs and symptoms through a database could support research into the molecular mechanisms of infectious diseases.
• 

  KAUST Assistant Professor Raphaël Huser receives American Statistical Association award

  1 min read · Tue, Sep 3 2019

  News

  Statistics of extremes spatio-temporal statistics copulas

  KAUST Assistant Professor Raphaël Huser recently received the American Statistical Association's (ASA) 2019 Section on Statistics and the Environment (ENVR) Early Investigator Award for his outstanding contributions to environmental statistics. He accepted the award at the 2019 Joint Statistical Meetings held in Denver, Colorado, U.S., from July 27 to August 1.
• 

  AI learns complex gene-disease patterns

  1 min read · Sun, Sep 1 2019

  News

  health artificial intelligence big data Computer science

  A deep learning model improves the ability to identify genes potentially involved in disease.

August 2019

• 

  Testing the blind spots in artificial intelligence

  1 min read · Thu, Aug 29 2019

  News

  machine learning artificial intelligence visual computing electrical engineering

  Understanding the situations when artificial intelligence can fail is critical for application of future autonomous vehicles and medical diagnostics.
• 

  R-INLA used to accurately predict forest fires in Portugal

  1 min read · Wed, Aug 28 2019

  News

  Professors Maria Antónia da Conceição Abrantes Amaral Turkman and Kamil Feridum Turkman, from the University of Lisbon used the INLA methodology and specifically SPDE's (using R-INLA), to do the official risk assessment for forest fire prediction in Portugal for 2018. The prediction s turned out to be very accurate and a new study is on the way for updating the predictions for 2020 with more detailed data.
• 

  KAUST Ph.D. student wins Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics award

  1 min read · Wed, Aug 21 2019

  News Spotlight

  Stochastic Modeling Quantitative finance Numerical simulation and analysis

  Chiheb Ben Hammouda, a KAUST Ph.D. student in the University's Stochastic Numerics Research Group, recently won the best poster award at the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) Conference on Financial Mathematics & Engineering (FM19) held at the University of Toronto from June 4 to 7. His winning poster, titled "Hierarchical adaptive sparse grids and quasi-Monte Carlo for option pricing under the rough Bergomi model," is one of several research projects carried out by Ben Hammouda under the supervision of KAUST Professor Raul Tempone.
• 

  Measuring solar stores of the Arabian Peninsula

  1 min read · Tue, Aug 20 2019

  News

  meteorology climate science solar energy supercomputing earth science and engineering

  Mapping variations in sunlight across the Arabian Peninsula reveals a bright future for solar energy in the region.
• 

  Statistics plot pollution to inform policy

  1 min read · Sun, Aug 18 2019

  News

  Environmental Statistics climate science pollution

  The spatial variation in different air pollution components helps identify possible targets for pollution control.
• 

  KAUST Research Conference 2019: New Trends in Biosensors and Bioelectronics

  1 min read · Tue, Aug 6 2019

  News

  bioelectronics Biosensors nanoelectronics

  The “KAUST Research Conference on New Trends in Biosensors and Bioelectronics” was held in KAUST between the 25th and 27th of February. This yearly event aims to give an overview of the most recent efforts in bioelectronics that tackle the “interface” problem and overcome the limits of the current technologies by generating new materials/architectures/device components. With its truly interdisciplinary nature, this conference will bring scientists from different disciplines together, including Chemistry, Electrical Engineering, Biology, and Material Science, who are at the top of their
• 

  KAUST student wins global sensors and measurement systems competition

  1 min read · Mon, Aug 5 2019

  News

  sensing platforms prototyping embedded systems

  KAUST master's degree student José Ilton de Oliveira Filho recently won first place at the second edition of the IEEE International Sensors and Measurement Systems Student Contest (IEEE IS&M-SC). IEEE IS&M-SC is a global competition directed at teams of advanced undergraduates, master's degree and Ph.D. students and seeks to stimulate creative ideas for sensor and measuring systems applications.
• 

  A breath of fresh information to help diagnosis

  1 min read · Sun, Aug 4 2019

  News

  communication networks wireless networks energy harvesting cognitive radio systems

  A communications concept could pinpoint a person infected with a deadly, contagious virus in the middle of a crowded airport.
• 

  Democratizing electronics one step at a time

  1 min read · Thu, Aug 1 2019

  News

  magnetism transducers sensors CMOS nanoelectronics flexible

  "You would not believe how many amazingly talented people there are in the world, but they often are just not exposed to opportunities," noted Muhammad Mustafa Hussain, KAUST professor of electrical engineering and currently a visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley. He is determined to try and change this—one step at a time.

July 2019

• 

  Fatimah Alhawaj Wins the Top Scientific Paper Award of the SRSI Program

  1 min read · Tue, Jul 30 2019

  News

  Fatimah Alhawaj, a visiting student in the Photonics Lab from the Saudi Research Science Institute (SRSI), won the Top Scientific Paper Award of the SRSI 2019 program for her paper entitled "Group-III Nitride Micro-Photodetector for High-Speed Visible Light Communication Link".
• 

  Flat lenses with a twist!

  1 min read · Tue, Jul 30 2019

  News

  optics lenses electrical engineering

  Overlaying two film layers patterned with a nanoscale array can manipulate the propagation of light to create a powerful ultrathin lens.
• 

  ISL has 10+ new visiting students joining this year

  1 min read · Tue, Jul 30 2019

  News

  ISL this year is receiving over 10+ students from all around the world. Students range from Montreal, Canada, to Ile-Ife, Nigeria. These visiting students are all supervised by Dr. Tareq AlNaffouri and working on a variety of topics within the Information Systems Lab. These students are a great asset to the lab, and will further develop their research skills through working with Professor AlNaffouri.
• 

  Davide Priante's Ph.D. Dissertation Defense

  1 min read · Tue, Jul 30 2019

  News

  Ultraviolet (UV) group III-Nitride-based light emitters have been used in various applications such as water purification, medicine, lighting, and chemical detection. Despite attractive properties such as bandgap tunability in the whole UV range (UV-C to UV-A), high chemical stability and relative low cost, the low quantum efficiency hamper the full utilization. In fact, external quantum efficiencies of UV devices are below 10 % for emission wavelength shorter than 350 nm.
• 

  ISL Students place 4th at Microsoft Indoor Localization Competition 2017

  1 min read · Mon, Jul 29 2019

  News

  Accurate indoor positioning has the potential to transform the way people navigate indoors similar to the way the GPS transformed outdoor navigation. Over the last 20 years, many indoor positioning technologies have been proposed and experimented by both academia and industry. We developed an accurate acoustic 3D positioning system, which consists of one mobile device (MD) and four base stations (BSs) with known locations. The MD transmits a series of ultrasound and RF sequences, named Zadoff-Chu (ZC) sequences, at the same time. The propagation time of the RF signal is negligible compared to
• 

  Single-electrode material streamlines functions into a tiny chip

  1 min read · Sun, Jul 28 2019

  News

  sensors energy storage material science and engineering IoT

  Ruthenium oxide is used to integrate energy-storing microsupercapacitors and thin-film electronics at the transistor level.
• 

  ISL Student Osama Bushnaq does an Delft Internship

  1 min read · Sun, Jul 28 2019

  News

  IoT

  Summary of Delft internship : Advanced sensor networks are needed in order to meet the increasing needs of IoT applications, such as automated surveillance, environmental monitoring, smart cities, and so on. Optimal sensor placement, i.e., to select the best subset of sensing locations out of a large set of available locations, keeping in mind the network infrastructure and the inference task, forms an important sensor network design task. In this internship, the offline sensor selection for source estimation is improved by considering different practical issues such as observation accuracy
• 

  ISL PhD Student Osama Bushnaq does Internship at UBC

  1 min read · Sun, Jul 28 2019

  News

  UAV IoT

  ISL PhD Student Osama Bushnaq did an internship at the University of British Coloumbia in Canada. His internship was focused on UAV-IoT. Every year, an average of 2.5 million hectares (ha) is burnt only in Canadian forests, which costs around 500 million to 1 billion Canadian dollars per year. The current forest fire detection methods such as satellite imaging and infrared cameras are not reliable. In order to detect forest fires before getting out of control, a new fire detection method based on Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Internet of Things (UAV-IoT) network was studied during this internship. A
• 

  Epilepsy study shows the shape of things to come

  1 min read · Sun, Jul 21 2019

  News

  brain science bioscience statistics

  Pyramidal graphs resulting from statistical analyses of EEG recordings can improve our understanding of epileptic seizures.
• 

  KAUST hosts International Graduate School on Control event

  1 min read · Mon, Jul 15 2019

  News

  intelligent systems robotics control systems

  KAUST recently acted as a host campus for the European Embedded Control Institute's International Graduate School on Control (IGSC). The IGSC is an annual series of 27 one-week graduate modules focusing on different topics of networked and embedded control and is taught to eligible attendees at different locations worldwide. The series is co-sponsored by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Control Systems Society and the International Federation of Automatic Control.
• 

  Mastering a prickly problem in ferrofluids

  1 min read · Sun, Jul 14 2019

  News

  Computer science visual computing nanoelectronics ferrofluids magnetic-field simulations

  Computer simulation accurately captures the beguiling motion of a liquid magnetic material.
• 

  New Book "Decision and Inhibitory Trees and Rules for Decision Tables with Many-valued Decisions" of Professor Moshkov and His Former Students is Published by Springer

  1 min read · Tue, Jul 9 2019

  News

  decision trees

  New book "Decision and Inhibitory Trees and Rules for Decision Tables with Many-valued Decisions" by Fawaz Alsolami, Mohammad Azad, Igor Chikalov, and Mikhail Moshkov is published by Springer
• 

  Teamwork pays off at startup Insyab

  1 min read · Mon, Jul 8 2019

  News

  robot drones wireless connectivity algorithm Energy-efficient wireless multihop networks Cross-layer protocol design

  Insyab, a technology startup specializing in smart solutions allowing robots and drones to collaborate on the execution of common tasks, resulted from three years of its founders' dedicated research at KAUST.
• 

  Red Sea temperatures to cool in coming decades

  1 min read · Sun, Jul 7 2019

  News

  geophysical fluid systems Bayesian Estimation uncertainty quantification

  Exploring the links between natural climate cycles and the sea-surface temperature of the Red Sea reveals a cooling trend during the next few decades.
• 

  Accelerating the grapevine effect

  1 min read · Sun, Jul 7 2019

  News

  optimization machine learning big data

  By looking at classical gossip algorithms from a novel perspective, KAUST Professor Peter Richtarik has found a way to significantly speed up gossip-based information sharing, and in the process, he discovered new applications for this efficient mathematical approach. Gossip involves the sharing of information between individuals in a network and can be applied mathematically in both human social networks and data networks, such as distributed sensors. “A network is a collection of nodes, each connected to other nodes via links,” explains Richtarik. “In social networks, for instance
• 

  KAUST Ph.D. student wins Three Minute Thesis competition

  1 min read · Wed, Jul 3 2019

  News

  sensors integrated circuits

  Muhammad Akram Karimi, a fourth-year KAUST Ph.D. student working in the Integrated Microwaves Packaging Antennas & Circuits Technology (IMPACT) Lab headed by Associate Professor Atif Shamim, won the Three Minute Thesis (3MT) competition held during the IEEE Microwave Theory and Techniques Society's International Microwave Symposium (IMS2019) in Boston, Massachusetts, U.S, in early June. IEEE IMS has been taking place for 60 years, and it is the flagship conference for microwave engineers and scientists.
• 

  KAUST Researchers Are the First to Generate Images of Realistic and Highly Detailed Texture Maps of Gigapixel in Size Using Deep Neural Networks

  1 min read · Tue, Jul 2 2019

  News

  Deep learning artificial intelligence machine learning

  KAUST researchers Anna Fruehstueck, Dr. Ibraheem Alhashim, and Prof. Peter Wonka have developed a novel technique to generate images of realistic and highly detailed texture maps using deep neural networks. The texture images synthesized by their system TileGAN can be of gigapixel size and are created by seamlessly merging smaller texture blocks into a single large image. The underlying neural networks are trained using high-resolution images such as detailed satellite imagery, maps and famous paintings.

June 2019

• 

  Madain Saleh

  1 min read · Sun, Jun 30 2019

  Spotlight

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• 

  New paper accepted in JGR - Earth Surface

  1 min read · Tue, Jun 25 2019

  Spotlight News

  Statistics of extremes Bayesian Statistics

  New accepted paper: Lombardo, L., Bakka, H., Tanyas, H., van Westen, C., Mai, P. M., and Huser, R. (2019+), Geostatistical modeling to capture seismic-shaking patterns from earthquake-induced landslides, Journal of Geophysical Research-Earth Surface [ PDF preprint]
• 

  New paper accepted in JABES

  1 min read · Tue, Jun 25 2019

  Spotlight News

  extreme weather spatio-temporal statistics Statistics of extremes

  New accepted paper: Castro-Camilo, D., Huser, R., and Rue, H. (2019+), A spliced Gamma-generalized Pareto model for short-term extreme wind speed probabilistic forecasting, Journal of Agricultural, Biological and Environmental Statistics, to appear [ PDF preprint]
• 

  A Precision, Energy-Efficient, Oversampling, Noise-Shaping Differential SAR Capacitance-to-Digital Converter

  1 min read · Tue, Jun 25 2019

  News

  Noise shaping capacitive sensors Circuits

  Abdulaziz Alhoshany, et al., "A Precision, Energy-Efficient, Oversampling, Noise-Shaping Differential SAR Capacitance-to-Digital Converter" IEEE Transactions on Instrumentation and Measurement, 68 (2), 2019, 392. This paper introduces an oversampling, noise-shaping differential successive-approximation-register capacitance-to-digital converter (CDC) architecture for interfacing capacitive sensors. The proposed energy-efficient CDC achieves high-precision capacitive resolution by employing oversampling and noise shaping. The switched-capacitor (SC) integrator is inserted between the comparator
• 

  Querying big data just got universal

  1 min read · Sun, Jun 23 2019

  News

  big data algorithm Computer science

  A universal query engine for big data that works across computing platforms could accelerate analytics research.
• Simulating Red Sea water exchanges

  1 min read · Sun, Jun 23 2019

  News

  oceanography Red Sea earth science and engineering

  Powerful computer simulations are revealing new insights into water exchanges between the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden.
• 

  Alumni Focus: Ronell Sicat

  1 min read · Thu, Jun 20 2019

  News

  immersive analytics computer graphics large-scale data visualization

  As the volume and complexity of data captured around the world continues to grow exponentially, new ways of exploring and visualizing this data are required. Today, society has moved beyond the traditional desktop computer with tools such as augmented and virtual reality (AR/VR) at the forefront of immersive data visualization and analysis.
• 

  Changing how we predict coral bleaching

  1 min read · Tue, Jun 18 2019

  News

  algorithm coral bleaching climate science earth science and engineering

  A remote sensing algorithm offers better predictions of Red Sea coral bleaching and can be fine tuned for use in other tropical marine ecosystems.
• 

  KAUST Professor Kazuhiro Ohkawa elected Fellow of the Japan Society of Applied Physics

  1 min read · Tue, Jun 18 2019

  Spotlight News

  semiconductors nitride photocatalyst artificial photosynthesis Laser Diodes

  By David Murphy, KAUST News KAUST Professor of Electrical Engineering Kazuhiro Ohkawa was recently elected as a Fellow of the Japan Society of Applied Physics (JSAP). The JSAP was established in 1930 as a voluntary forum for applied physics researchers in the country. Ohkawa's JSAP peers recognized him for his exceptional contributions to the progression of applied physics and his specific contribution to the "development of wide bandgap semiconductor epitaxial growth and optical devices," JSAP stated. "It is a great honor for me to be elected as a Fellow of the JSAP," Ohkawa noted. "The
• 

  Remote sensing of toxic algal blooms

  1 min read · Thu, Jun 13 2019

  News

  Red Sea environment marine science earth science and engineering

  Algal blooms in the Red Sea can be detected with a new method that accounts for dust storms and aerosols.
• 

  KAUST Ph.D student, Jorge A. Holguin-Lerma, awarded 2019 SPIE Optics and Photonics Education Scholarship

  1 min read · Tue, Jun 11 2019

  Awards News Spotlight

  Visible light communications Photonic IC Laser Diodes III-Nitride Optoelectronics

  SPIE, the international society for optics and photonics, recently awarded KAUST Ph.D. student Jorge Holguín-Lerma a 2019 Optics and Photonics Education Scholarship for his potential research contributions to optics, photonics or other related fields. Holguín-Lerma joined KAUST in August 2016 and is a member of Professor Boon S. Ooi's Photonics Laboratory.
• 

  Taif

  1 min read · Mon, Jun 10 2019

  Spotlight

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• 

  Tabuk

  1 min read · Sun, Jun 9 2019

  Spotlight

  Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry. Lorem Ipsum has been the industry's standard dummy text ever since the 1500s, when an unknown printer took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book. It has survived not only five centuries, but also the leap into electronic typesetting, remaining essentially unchanged. It was popularised in the 1960s with the release of Letraset sheets containing Lorem Ipsum passages, and more recently with desktop publishing software like Aldus PageMaker including versions of Lorem Ipsum.