Prof. Nella Rotundo, Department of Mathematics University of Florence, Italy
Wednesday, May 03, 2023, 11:00
- 12:00
Building 1, Level 4, Room 4102
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Tuesday, May 02, 2023, 18:00
- 20:00
KAUST
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This dissertation focuses on the challenge of learning with small amounts of annotated data in graph machine learning. The scarcity of annotated data can severely degrade the performance of graph learning models, and the ability to learn with small amounts of data, known as data-efficient graph learning, is essential for achieving strong generalization in low-data regimes. The dissertation proposes three methods to address the challenges of graph learning in low-data scenarios, including a graph meta-learning framework, a solution for few-shot graph classification, and a cross-domain knowledge transfer model. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methods in improving model generalization for data-efficient graph learning.
Prof. Hussein Hoteit, Energy Resources and Petroleum Engineering, KAUST
Tuesday, May 02, 2023, 16:00
- 17:00
Building 2, Level 5, Room 5220
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Reservoir simulation is an essential tool in reservoir engineering, enabling effective management and optimization of reservoirs. Despite minimal changes in the fundamental sciences since the development of reservoir simulators, advancements in computational power and linear solvers have significantly improved the technology. However, the reliability and ability to improve decision quality of reservoir models remain debatable.
Dr. Salam Baniahmed, Technical Manager, Veloce Energy
Tuesday, May 02, 2023, 15:00
- 16:00
Building 1, Level 4, Room 4214
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The fact of power systems’ criticality to national security mandates continuous attention to the worst-case disruption scenarios. In a cyber world, grid modernization efforts have been hindered by cyber-related concerns. This webinar sheds some light on resiliency achievement by utilizing the modular cyber-physical nature of power systems, from an electron in a battery to a digital bit in the internet abyss.
Tuesday, May 02, 2023, 14:00
- 16:00
Building 3, Level 2, Lobby Sea Side
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This thesis investigates the potential of flat optics as a solution to the problem of bulky and expensive optical components in producing lightweight and wearable optoelectronic devices. The research addresses scalability challenges in structure fabrication, design of broadband functionalities, and increasing operational and transmission efficiency in the visible range. It focuses on the experimental part of the challenge. The study evaluates various design approaches, including inverse designs using optimization techniques as well as the use of machine learning algorithms. The thesis aims to explore a path toward high efficiency, wide bandwidth, functional response, and scalable fabrication in flat optics using semiconductor nanostructures. The results demonstrate the potential of using semiconductor nanostructures to engineer efficient, scalable, and broadband optical components for light processing via flat surfaces.
The 2nd SAAI Factory Hackathon Kickoff Symposium 2023
Tuesday, May 02, 2023, 09:00
- 17:00
Building 20, Auditorium
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We are pleased to invite you to the second SAAI (Super Artistic AI) Factory Hackathon 2023, a program chaire

Peter Teunissen, Professor, Geodesy and Satellite Navigation, Delft University of Technology (DUT), Netherlands Honorary Professor at Melbourne and Curtin Universities, Australia, and Beihang and Tongji Universities, China
Monday, May 01, 2023, 13:00
- 14:00
Building 1, Level 3, Room 3119
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GNSS PPP-RTK is an integer ambiguity resolution enabled precise point positioning concept originally developed for use with the ultra-precise CDMA-based Global Navigation Satellite System carrier-phase signals. In this presentation, we first present the classical principles of PPP-RTK as they apply to the CDMA-based global and regional satellite navigation systems GPS, BeiDou, Galileo, QZSS and IRNSS.
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
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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.
Semeen Rehman, Assistant Professor, Electrical Engineering and Information Technology, TU Wien
Monday, May 01, 2023, 12:00
- 13:00
Building 9, Level 1, Room 3131
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Embedded systems are currently an indispensable part of our lives because of their pervasive deployment in a wide range of critical applications (e.g., automotive, encryption, and healthcare, etc.) as well as non-critical applications (e.g., image/video processing, etc.). These embedded system form the fundamental components of today’s Cyber Physical Systems (CPS) and Internet-of-Things (IoT), which are subjected to stringent constraints in terms of reliability, security, and power-/energy especially in case of battery-driven scenarios. Due to the shrinking transistor dimensions, embedded computing hardware are increasingly susceptible to a wide range of reliability threats e.g., transient faults (such as soft errors due to high-energy particle strikes) and permanent faults due to design-time process variations and run-time aging effects. These threats may lead to functional and timing errors that may jeopardize the correct application’s executions. Furthermore, security has also become a crucial aspect in today’s systems because of several security threats, e.g., confidentiality threat to steal the IP or private information via side channel attacks. These reliability and security threats may lead to a catastrophic impact on the robustness of embedded systems. Another key design constraint of a battery-driven embedded platform is power-/energy-wise efficiency, e.g., a device under a low power/battery mode during the critical application execution may miss a critical event that may lead to a catastrophic outcome. In order to address the above-mentioned challenges, it is crucial to investigate different techniques at the hardware and software layers. In this talk, I will first highlight the key robustness and energy efficiency challenges in embedded computing systems, and will present techniques to address these challenges.
Monday, May 01, 2023, 12:00
- 13:00
Building 9, Level 3, Room 3128
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The Mardia measures of multivariate skewness and kurtosis summarize the respective characteristics of a multivariate distribution with two numbers. However, these measures do not reflect the sub-dimensional features of the distribution. Consequently, testing procedures based on these measures may fail to detect skewness or kurtosis present in a sub-dimension of the multivariate distribution. We introduce sub-dimensional Mardia measures of multivariate skewness and kurtosis, and investigate the information they convey about all sub-dimensional distributions of some symmetric and skewed families of multivariate distributions.
Monday, May 01, 2023, 08:00
- 17:00
Auditorium between Building 4 & 5
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Computational Bioscience Research Center (CBRC) is pleased to announce the KAUST Research Conference 2023 on

Tuesday, April 18, 2023, 16:00
- 17:00
Building 2, Level 5, Room 5220
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During the recent pandemic, urgent advances have been made by the scientific community in developing artificial intelligence (AI)-based computer-aided systems for CT-based COVID-19 diagnosis. In this talk, I will introduce our work on a fully-automatic, rapid, accurate, and machine-agnostic method that can segment and quantify the infection regions on CT scans from different sources.
Monday, April 17, 2023, 17:30
- 18:30
B5, L5, R5220
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Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) are a very successful method for high-quality image synthesis and are a powerful tool to generate realistic images by learning their visual properties from a dataset of exemplars. However, the controllability of the generator output still poses many challenges. In this thesis, we propose several methods for achieving larger and/or higher visual quality in GAN outputs by combining latent space manipulations with image compositing operations
S. Majid Hassanizadeh, Professor, Stuttgart University, Germany, Utrecht University, The Netherlands,
Monday, April 17, 2023, 12:00
- 13:00
Building 9, Level 3, Room 3128
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Pore-scale models are valuable tools for the investigation of various flow and transport processes in porous media, and upscaling from pore to core scales. Popular approaches include pore-network models (PNM), Lattice-Boltzman models (LBM), Smooth Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH), volume-of-fluid method (VOF), and grain-scale models (GSM).
Monday, April 17, 2023, 12:00
- 13:00
Building 9, Level 2, Room 2325, Hall 2
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This talk introduces serverless computing, a programming model that has flourished in the last few years, mainly because it allows developers to concentrate on the application logic and not worry about scalability and resource management. Current serverless offerings give users limited flexibility for configuring the resources allocated to their function invocations. We take a principled approach to the problem of resource allocation for serverless functions, analyzing the effects of automating this choice in a way that leads to the best combination of performance and cost.
Sunday, April 16, 2023, 12:00
- 13:00
Building 9, Level 2, Room 2325
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Being renowned for operating with visible light pulses and electrical signals, optoelectronic smart non-volatile memory devices have excellent potential for neuromorphic computing systems and artificial visual information processing.
Prof. Nader Masmoudi
Thursday, April 13, 2023, 13:30
- 14:30
Building 2, Level 5, Room 5220
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We investigate reversal and recirculation for the stationary Prandtl equations. Reversal describes the solution after the Goldstein singularity, and is characterized by  regions in which $u > 0$ and $u < 0$. The classical point of view of regarding the Prandtl equations as an evolution  equation in $x$ completely breaks down since $u$ changes sign. Instead, we view the problem as a quasilinear, mixed-type, free-boundary problem. Joint work with Sameer Iyer.
Wednesday, April 12, 2023, 12:00
- 13:00
Building 2, Level 5, Room 5209
A personal presentation describing the role of computational biology and bioinformatics in addressing state-of-the-art biomedical challenges. First, I will provide an overview of the transition between a Ph.D. in Mathematics to a postdoc in Computational Biology: How did it happen? What were the challenges? Secondly, I will briefly present several current case studies where computational biology (in several flavors) is core to understanding novel biological data related to multi-omic data analysis, spatial profiling, gene therapy, and more.
Stefan Sauter, Professor, Institute of Mathematics, University of Zurich
Tuesday, April 11, 2023, 16:00
- 17:00
Building 2, Level 5, Room 5220
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We consider non-conforming discretizations of the stationary Stokes equation in two and three dimensions by Crouzeix-Raviart type elements. The original definition in the seminal paper by M. Crouzeix and P.-A. Raviart in 1973 is implicit and also contains substantial freedom for a concrete choice.
Monday, April 10, 2023, 17:00
- 19:00
Building 3, Level 5, Room 5220
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Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) have shown huge success over the years to solve many 2D computer vision tasks driven by massive labeled 2D datasets and advancements in 2D vision models, but less success is witnessed on 3D vision tasks. This dissertation proposes innovative approaches to enhance the robustness of DNNs for 3D understanding and in 3D settings. The research focuses on two main areas: adversarial robustness on 3D data and setups, and the robustness of DNNs to realistic 3D scenarios. Two paradigms for 3D understanding are discussed: representing 3D as a set of 3D points and performing 2D processing of multiple images of the 3D data.
Monday, April 10, 2023, 12:00
- 13:00
Building 9, Level 2, Room 2325, Hall 2
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In this seminar I will present how to create 3D computer graphics and visualization systems for the web, using WebAssmbly and WebGPU language specifications, which are new, bleeding-edge technologies. Previously, accelerated graphics on the web was based on JavaScript libraries, which is still very popular, but they do not offer detailed memory management and code optimization, necessary for systems requiring high memory load and high computational demands. WebAssembly and WebGPU can be compiled from the C++ or Rust code, which also allows the deployment of the same codebase either for web or for the desktop-based applications.
Shuyu Sun, Professor of Earth Science and Engineering، KAUST
Monday, April 10, 2023, 12:00
- 13:00
Building 9, Level 3, Room 3128
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Reservoir simulation usually involves the fluid flow of partially miscible multi-component multi-phase mixture in porous media.  Phase behavior of fluid mixture is a crucial component of many multi-phase flow framework.  Accurate modeling and robust computation of the phase behavior is essential for optimal design and cost-effective operations in petroleum reservoirs as well as in a petroleum processing plant.  A typical problem formulation in phase behavior is two-phase constant volume flash, i.e., the two-phase  phase-split under the constant temperature, moles, and volume.
Yue Zhao, Computer Engineering, Carnegie Mellon University
Sunday, April 09, 2023, 12:00
- 13:00
Building 9, Level 2, Room 2325
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Many real-world events do not have outcome labels. For example, the fraudulence of a transaction remains unknown until it is discovered.