The Scoop
A small but growing number of students in US universities is looking to Abu Dhabi as a destination to study artificial intelligence, a sign of the increasing global competition for AI talent.
One in four participants in a monthlong internship hosted at the Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI) came from US campuses. Around 2,000 applied — nearly double the number the previous year — from dozens of countries for 57 slots, Timothy Baldwin, provost and professor of natural language processing, told Semafor. Many applicants came from top computer science programs like Georgia Institute of Technology, University of California, and University of Illinois, he said.
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The internship program is a recruitment tool for MBZUAI, Baldwin said. The majority of interns admitted go on to apply to MBZUAI’s graduate programs after working on projects in health care, language processing, and robotics.
This is key, given that the six-year-old university is building everything from the ground up.
“AI is a field that is driven almost entirely by continuous research and development,” Baldwin said, attributing the university’s growing presence amongst US students to direct engagement with top schools and referrals from faculty and alumni, as well as curiosity about Abu Dhabi’s reputation as an early adopter of the technology.
MBZUAI offers Masters and PhD degrees in AI fields like computer vision and machine learning, and will welcome its first undergraduate class this fall. The UAE government grants full scholarships to all students and retains ownership of any intellectual property that comes out of the campus.
While research is important, the university’s president — a computer scientist who has taught at Stanford and Carnegie Mellon — has said the goal is not to produce legions of academics but instead to create a pipeline of AI talent for the local economy, in sectors such as energy and health care, and in government.
Notable
- MBZUAI President Eric Xing discussed the impact of the US-UAE AI partnership on the university with Bloomberg.
- To counter Chinese influence, the US should build data centers in Saudi Arabia and the UAE, a fellow from the Middle East Institute argued in Foreign Policy.