Events

May 16 - May 10, 2026

Differentiable Optics for Automated Optical Design and End-to-end Computational Imaging

Xinge Yang, Ph.D. Student, Computer Science

May 11, 17:00 - 18:30

B1 R2202

differentiable optics computational imaging optical design automated design augmented reality virtual reality AR VR

May 9 - May 3, 2026

Multimodal Agents: From Automation toward Open-Ended Self-Improvement

Mingchen Zhuge, Ph.D. Student, Computer Science

May 9, 17:30 - 19:30

B4 R5220; Zoom Meeting 91489077683

AI agents coding Multi-agent systems world models recursive self-improvement LLM Deep Reinforcement Learning

KAUST CEMSE CS Ph.D. Dissertation Defense Salma Kharrat

Learning under Limited Information across Federated, Multi-Agent, and LLM Settings

Salma Kharrat, Ph.D. Student, Computer Science

May 7, 15:00 - 16:45

B3 R5220

Federated learning personalized learning decentralized learning Reinforcement Learning black-box optimization prompt optimization decentralized systems combinatorial optimization observability inference Trustworthy AI trustworthy machine learning intelligent systems LLM

What Survives When Code Doesn’t?

Dr. Laurent Bindschaedler, Research Group Leader, Max Planck Institute for Software Systems (MPI-SWS)

May 4, 12:00 - 13:00

B9 R2325

Trustworthy AI trustworthy machine learning coding AI axplainable AI software development

May 2 - Apr 26, 2026

Causal Reasoning in Medical Digital Twins: Methods and Architectures

Sakhaa Alsaedi, Ph.D. Student, Computer Science

Apr 29, 03:00 - 05:00

B3 R5209

explainable AI reasoning causal representation learning medical digital twins personalized medicine AI AI for healthcare

KAUST CEMSE ECE Graduate Seminar Sunday, Apr. 26

Publication Ethics and Authorship - Including the Responsible and Ethical Use of AI in Research

Sidney Engelbrecht, Senior Research Compliance Specialist, Research Operations

Apr 26, 12:00 - 13:00

B9 R2325

research ethics scientific research AI

Apr 25 - Apr 19, 2026

KAUST CEMSE ECE Graduate Seminar Sunday, Apr. 19

Introduction to Research Ethics and Integrity - Including Issues Around Research Misconduct

Sidney Engelbrecht, Senior Research Compliance Specialist, Research Operations

Apr 19, 12:00 - 13:00

B9 R2325

research ethics scientific research

Apr 18 - Apr 12, 2026

Private and Robust Learning for Decision Making

Yulian Wu, Ph.D. Student, Computer Science

Apr 14, 15:00 - 17:00

B4 R5220; Zoom Meeting 98132861421

decision making Trustworthy AI privacy-preserving AI Data Privacy machine learning artificial intelligence AI

Apr 11 - Apr 5, 2026

KAUST CEMSE Dean's Distinguished Lecture Rethinking Research: The Role of Humans in Scientific Discovery in the Age of LLMs*

The Role of Humans in Scientific Discovery in the Age of LLMs — Beyond Asking: Turning LLMs into Research Collaborators

Sir Bashir M. Al-Hashimi, Vice President, Research & Innovation, King’s College London (KCL); Distinguished Professor, Department of Engineering, Faculty of Natural, Mathematical & Engineering Sciences, King’s College London (KCL)

Apr 8, 12:00 - 14:15

B9 R2325

AI artificial intelligence LLM scientific research scientific knowledge Assistive Technology

KAUST CEMSE CS Graduate Seminar Monday, Apr. 6

DePIN: From Decentralization Promise to Security Reality - A Critical Dissection of Trust, Privacy, and Architectural Illusions

Roberto Di Pietro, Professor, Computer Science

Apr 6, 12:00 - 13:00

B9 R2325

privacy preserving techniques cybersecurity Web and Network security DePIN Decentralized Physical Infrastructure Networks VPNs dVPNs computer networking decentralized infrastructure systems

Apr 4 - Mar 29, 2026

KAUST CEMSE CS Graduate Seminar Monday, Mar. 30

Can AI Make Physicians Better at Diagnosis?

Ihsan Ayyub Qazi, Full Professor, Computer Science, Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS)

Mar 30, 12:00 - 13:00

B9 R2325

AI Trustworthy AI Diagnosis behavioral analysis decision making LLM Biomedical

Mar 21 - Mar 15, 2026

KAUST CEMSE CS Graduate Seminar Monday, Mar. 16

Demystifying Adversarial Patch Attacks and Defenses in the Physical World

Tao Ni, Assistant Professor, Computer Science

Mar 16, 12:00 - 13:00

B9 R2325

Trustworthy AI Computer Vision computational predictions spoofing

Mar 14 - Mar 8, 2026

Provable and Measurable Machine Unlearning in Modern Learning Systems

Cheng-Long Wang, Ph.D. Student, Computer Science

Mar 10, 10:30 - 12:30

B2 L5 R5209

Machine Unlearning Data Privacy Trustworthy AI Federated learning machine learning AI

Learning to Identify and Exploit Neural Network Dynamics in Multi-Step Inference

Haozhe Liu, Ph.D. Student, Computer Science

Mar 9, 13:30 - 15:30

B4 L5 R5220; Zoom Meeting 95866424218

Extreme Computing Universals

David Keyes, Professor, Applied Mathematics and Computational Science

Mar 9, 12:00 - 13:00

B9 L2 R2325

HPC APIs extreme computing smart systems parallel computing software development

Mar 7 - Mar 1, 2026

KAUST CEMSE Ph.D. Dissertation Defense Ilies Benhabbour Assessing Network Middlebox Impact on End-to-End Protocol Behavior via a Distributed and Reprogrammable Framework

Assessing Network Middlebox Impact on End-to-End Protocol Behavior via a Distributed and Reprogrammable Framework

Ilies Benhabbour, Ph.D. Student, Computer Science

Mar 4, 13:00 - 16:00

B5 L5 R5220

cybersecurity Cryptography distributed computing

From Prompts to Production: The Systems Agenda for Agentic AI

Marco Canini, Professor, Computer Science

Mar 2, 12:00 - 13:00

B9 L2 R2325

AI observability reproducibility Computer Information Systems

Feb 28 - Feb 22, 2026

Towards Scalable and Structured Understanding in Visual LLMs

Mohamed Elhoseiny, Associate Professor, Computer Science

Feb 23, 12:00 - 13:00

B9 L2 R2325

LLM Visual Language Models VLMs visual computing

Feb 21 - Feb 15, 2026

Eyes in the Sky: AI-Based Camel Identification and Tracking Using Drones

Basem Shihada, Program Chair, Computer Science

Feb 16, 12:00 - 13:00

B9 L2 R2325

AI drones animal tracking

Feb 14 - Feb 8, 2026

Accelerating Branch-and-Bound Graph Algorithms with GPUs

Izzat El Hajj, Assistant Professor, Computer Science, American University of Beirut (AUB)

Feb 9, 12:00 - 13:00

B9 L2 R2325

parallel computing optimization GPU Algorithms HPC Graph Theory Efficient

Rising Stars in AI Symposium 2026

Feb 9, 08:00 - 17:00

KAUST Campus

AI artificial intelligence

Feb 7 - Feb 1, 2026

Efficient Machine Learning for Scientific and Medical Applications

Yasir Ghunaim, Ph.D., Computer Science

Feb 4, 18:00 - 20:00

B4/5 L0 A0215

Efficient Machine Learning machine learning Graph Neural Networks

From Dialects to Peptides: Scalable and Efficient AI for People

Muhammad Abdul-Mageed, Canada Research Chair, Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning; Associate Professor, School of Information, Department of Linguistics, The University of British Columbia

Feb 2, 12:00 - 13:00

B9 L2 R2325

AI Efficient Efficient Machine Learning

Jan 31 - Jan 25, 2026

Thoughts About Machine Learning

Jürgen Schmidhuber, Professor, Computer Science

Jan 26, 15:30 - 17:30

B9, Lecture Hall 1, R-2322

AI machine learning deep learning

KAUST CEMSE CS Graduate Seminar Ruggero Pintus Shedding New Light on the Past: Applications of Multi-Light Image Collections in Cultural Heritage

Shedding New Light on the Past: Applications of Multi-Light Image Collections in Cultural Heritage

Ruggero Pintus, Senior Researcher, Center for Advanced Studies, Research and Development in Sardinia (CRS4)

Jan 26, 12:00 - 13:00

B9 L2 R2325

interactive visualization image processing data acquisition

KAUST Research Conference on Mathematical and Data Sciences

Jan 26 - 28, All day

KAUST Campus

data science scientific computing Computer science

Empowering Natural Intelligence with Artificial Intelligence: a Mathematician's Perspective

Alfio Quarteroni, Emeritus Professor, Politecnico di Milano and EPFL

Jan 25, 14:00 - 15:00

B9, L2, R2322

Computational mathematics numerical methods Scientific Machine Learning scientific computing applied mathematics

Dec 13 - Dec 7, 2025

Overcoming Catastrophic Forgetting: From Efficiency to Safety

Lama Alssum, Ph.D. Student, Computer Science

Dec 11, 14:00 - 15:00

B3 L5 R5220

AI machine learning Computer Vision

Tales of a Spur Hunter: The Wandering Spur

Michael Peter Kennedy, Full Professor, School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, University College Dublin

Dec 7, 12:00 - 13:00

B9 L2 R2325

Dec 6 - Nov 30, 2025

Will AI Replace Professors?

Pavel Pevzner, Ronald R. Taylor Chair and Distinguished Professor, Computer Science and Engineering, University of California, San Diego

Dec 4, 12:00 - 13:00

B2/B3 L0 A0215

First Provably Optimal Asynchronous SGD for Homogeneous and Heterogeneous Data

Arto Maranjyan, Ph.D. Student, Computer Science

Dec 4, 08:30 - 11:00

B4/5 L0 A0215

machine learning optimization asynchronous algorithms Training

I/O Coordination for Better Resource Sharing - From HPC to AI Storage

Xiaosong Ma, Department Chair and Professor of Computer Science, Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI)

Dec 1, 12:00 - 13:00

B9, Level 2, Room 2325

ai storage

Nov 29 - Nov 23, 2025

Balancing Accuracy and Efficiency: Compact Representations for Flow and Multivariate Visualization

Amani Ageeli, Ph.D. Student, Computer Science

Nov 25, 10:00 - 12:00

B3 L5 R5220

Scientific Visualization real-time rendering computer graphics interactive visualization large datasets multivariate functional data

Training Neural Networks at Any Scale

Volkan Cevher, Associate Professor, School of Engineering, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL), Switzerland

Nov 24, 12:00 - 13:00

B9 L2 R2325

machine learning Numerical simulation and analysis Reinforcement Learning deep learning optimization

KAUST Workshop on Distributed Training in the Era of Large Models

Nov 24 - 26, All day

Auditorium between B4 & 5, L0, R0215

machine learning Distributed algorithms generative models ML

Nov 22 - Nov 16, 2025

Observer-Relative Flow Visualization and Objective Feature Extraction

Xingdi Zhang, Ph.D. Student, Computer Science

Nov 19, 16:30 - 18:00

B1 L4 R4214

visual computing scientific computing deep learning

Gaussian Splatting: A Novel Paradigm for 3D Scene Representation and Rendering

Ivan Viola, Professor, Computer Science

Nov 17, 12:00 - 13:00

B9 L2 R2325

Nov 15 - Nov 9, 2025

First Provably Optimal Asynchronous SGD for Homogeneous and Heterogeneous Data

Arto Maranjyan, Ph.D. Student, Computer Science

Nov 13, 12:00 - 13:00

B9 L2 R2325

machine learning optimization asynchronous algorithms Training

KAUST-CEMSE-CS-Graduate-Seminar-Athman-Bouguettaya-Service-Based-Approach-Drone-Service-Delivery-Skyway-Networks.jpg

A Service-Based Approach to Drone Service Delivery in Skyway Networks

Athman Bouguettaya, Professor, School of Computer Science, The University of Sydney

Nov 10, 12:00 - 13:00

B9 L2 R2325

drones optimization Quality of service

KAUST-CEMSE-CS-PhD-Dissertation-Defense-Victor-Ceballos-Inza

On adopting Gauss maps into geometry tools for Computer-Aided Design

Victor Ceballos Inza, Ph.D. Student, Computer Science

Nov 10, 11:30 - 13:00

B1, L3, R3426

gauss maps computer-aided design

AI-Driven Smart Wearables in Health and Sport Application

Luyao Yang, Ph.D. Student, Networking Research Lab

Nov 10, 09:00 - 11:00

B1 L3 R3119

smart health

Nov 8 - Nov 2, 2025

Don’t be the Jean-Claude Van Damme of Your Research Area

Ahmed El-Roby, Associate Professor, School of Computer Science, Carleton University

Nov 3, 12:00 - 13:00

B9, L2, R2325

Nov 1 - Oct 26, 2025

Ringleader ASGD: The First Asynchronous SGD with Optimal Time Complexity under Data Heterogeneity

Arto Maranjyan, Ph.D. Student, Computer Science

Oct 28, 14:30 - 15:30

B1 L3 R3119

BiCoLoR: Communication-Efficient Optimization with Bidirectional Compression and Local Training

Laurent Condat, Senior Research Scientist, Computer Science

Oct 27, 12:00 - 13:00

B9 L2 R2325

optimization Distributed algorithms Signal and Image Processing

Oct 18 - Oct 12, 2025

Bio-Inspired Consensus Enabledby Distributed Active Perception

Fumin Zhang, Chair Professor and Director, Cheng Kar-Shun Robotics Institute, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

Oct 13, 12:00 - 13:00

Auditorium (between Buildings 4 and 5), Level 0, Room 0215

Oct 11 - Oct 5, 2025

FIFA Research Institute

Silvio Giancola, Research Scientist, Image and Video Understanding Lab

Oct 6, 12:00 - 13:00

B9 L2 R2325

AI Sports FIFA

Oct 4 - Sep 28, 2025

Robotics at KAUST

Eric Feron, Professor, Electrical and Computer Engineering

Sep 29, 12:00 - 13:00

B9 L2 R2325

robotics

Sep 27 - Sep 21, 2025

Advice and Comments About Research

Peter Wonka, Professor, Computer Science

Sep 22, 12:00 - 13:00

B9 L2 R2325

academic life

Sep 20 - Sep 14, 2025

From the Ball-Proximal (Broximal) Point Method to Efficient Training of LLMs

Peter Richtarik, Professor, Computer Science

Sep 15, 12:00 - 13:00

B9 L2 R2325

AI machine learning optimization algorithms LLM

Sep 13 - Sep 7, 2025

Building a Safer and More Equitable Internet in the Age of AI

Zafar Qazi, Associate Professor, Computer Science, Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS)

Sep 8, 12:00 - 13:00

B9 L2 R2325