News

August 2019

• 

  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

  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.
• 

  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

  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.
• 

  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.
• 

  KAUST Associate Professor Jr-Hau He wins Nano Energy Award 2019

  1 min read · Sun, Jun 9 2019

  Awards Spotlight News

  nanomaterials hydrogen energy optoelectronics nanotechnology

  The Beijing Institute of Nanoenergy and Nanosystems of the Chinese Academy of Sciences recently announced that KAUST Associate Professor Jr-Hau He is one of three selected scholars who will receive the Nano Energy Awards 2019.
• 

  Al Balad

  1 min read · Sat, Jun 8 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.
• 

  Al Riyadh

  1 min read · Sat, Jun 1 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.
• 

  Compound Semiconductor features “Narrowing the linewidth of the green laser”

  1 min read · Sat, Jun 1 2019

  News

  ​Narrowing the linewidth of the green laser was featured in the June issue Compound Semiconductor Magazine.​

May 2019

• 

  Measurement Selection: A Random Matrix Theory Approach

  1 min read · Thu, May 30 2019

  News

  Random Matrix Theory Measurement Wireless Communications

  Khalil Elkhalil , Student Member, IEEE, Abla Kammoun, Member, IEEE, Tareq Y. Al-Naffouri, Member, IEEE, and Mohamed-Slim Alouini , Fellow, IEEE Abstract This paper considers the problem of selecting a set of k measurements from n available sensor observations. The selected measurements should minimize a certain error function assessing the error in estimating a certain m dimensional parameter vector. The exhaustive search inspecting each of the (n) possible choices would require very high computational k complexity and as such is not practical for large n and k. Alternative methods with low
• 

  Study finds Red Sea may be cooling rather than warming

  1 min read · Thu, May 30 2019

  News

  Bayesian Estimation Geophysical Fluid Modeling uncertainty quantification

  A recent study by a team including KAUST Earth scientists and oceanographers revealed that surface temperatures in the Red Sea may be cooling rather than rising. Analysis of long-term data sets shows that the current high warming rates of the Red Sea appear to be a combined effect of global warming and natural long-duration changes in sea surface temperature. "Our study has revealed a sequence of alternating positive and negative trends in Red Sea surface temperatures. Over the next decades, the trends indicate a cooling phase that may counter the effects of global warming," stated Ibrahim
• 

  Alumni Focus: Faisal Nawab

  1 min read · Wed, May 29 2019

  News Spotlight

  KAUST alumnus Faisal Nawab received his master's degree in computer science from the University in 2011. His M.S. thesis work, which focused on how to build wireless network infrastructure, was supervised by KAUST Associate Professor Basem Shihada.
• 

  Ph.D. student's innovative research wins awards

  1 min read · Sun, May 26 2019

  Awards News Spotlight

  student award

  KAUST Ph.D. student Khalil Youssef Moussi recently had his innovative research recognized at the 14th Annual IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) International Conference on Nano/Micro Engineered and Molecular Systems (NEMS). At the event, which was held in Bangkok, Thailand, from April 11 to 14, the electrical engineering student was a finalist of the Best Student Paper Award and a finalist of the Best Conference Paper Award.
• 

  KAUST robotics team wins honors at European Robotics League event

  1 min read · Tue, May 21 2019

  Awards News Spotlight

  honor

  A team of researchers from the KAUST Robotics, Intelligent Systems, and Control (RISC) lab won both the "Best Air Team" special award and the European Global Navigation Satellite Systems Agency special prize during the recent European Robotics League (ERL) Emergency Robots Challenge in Sevilla, Spain. From February 18 to 23, the KAUST RISC team competed with several international university robotics teams from Croatia, France and Poland to complete a set of diverse aerial robotic challenges.
• 

  KAUST Professor David Keyes to chair International Supercomputing Conference 2020

  1 min read · Mon, May 20 2019

  Spotlight News

  supercomputing conference

  David Keyes, KAUST professor of applied mathematics and computational science; director of the University's Extreme Computing Research Center; and senior associate to the President of KAUST, will chair the International Supercomputing Conference (ISC) 2020. He will be the first program chair from a Middle Eastern institution, as announced by ISC 2020.
• Better racing car design through an industry partnership

  1 min read · Sun, May 19 2019

  News

  applied mathematics computational science fluid dynamics aerodynamics

  The Formula 1 race track is the ultimate testbed for a KAUST researcher's latest work.
• 

  Alumni Focus: Manal Kalkatawi

  1 min read · Thu, May 16 2019

  News Spotlight

  Manal Kalkatawi graduated from KAUST in 2017 with a Ph.D. in computer science with a focus on bioinformatics. She is currently an assistant professor at the Faculty of Computing and Information Technology at King Abdulaziz University (KAU) in Jeddah. Kalkatawi also pursues research in her field of specialization through cooperation with different research organizations, and she supervises master's degree theses of KAU students.
• 

  Cutting datasets down to size

  1 min read · Thu, May 16 2019

  News

  applied mathematics computational science statistics environment

  A powerful statistical tool could significantly reduce the burden of analyzing very large datasets.
• West Africa warms but airborne dust keeps the Red Sea cool

  1 min read · Wed, May 15 2019

  News

  climate science climate projections supercomputing earth science and engineering

  World-class computing facilities at KAUST enable researchers to tackle complex questions in climate science and oceanography.
• 

  KAUST Associate Professor Andrea Fratalocchi’s research leads to Institute of Physics Fellowship

  1 min read · Sun, May 12 2019

  Awards Spotlight News

  photonics cybersecurity

  Andrea Fratalocchi, associate professor in the University's Computer, Electrical and Mathematical Science and Engineering (CEMSE) division, was recently granted a Fellowship of the Institute of Physics (FInstP) by the Institute of Physics (IOP). Fratalocchi was awarded the IOP's highest level of membership in recognition of his outstanding accomplishments in physics.
• 

  Taking aim at outliers

  1 min read · Sun, May 5 2019

  News

  statistics Environmental Statistics

  Automatic detection of uncharacteristic data sequences could change the way data is processed and analyzed.
• Smart pill bottle keeps drugs safe

  1 min read · Sun, May 5 2019

  News

  drug safety sensors electrical engineering

  Low-cost, stretchy sensors can be assembled inside the lid of a drug container to help monitor patient safety.
• 

  Al Baha

  1 min read · Sat, May 4 2019

  Spotlight