JEDDAH: Google recently awarded five seed grants to faculty members at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology to support research in artificial intelligence in Saudi Arabia.

The grants, which total $100,000, will fund research projects focused on multilingual, multimodal machine learning, specifically using generative and large language models (LLMs).
The researchers from the computer, electrical and mathematical sciences and engineering (CEMSE) division at KAUST will explore topics such as health, cross-cultural language understanding, sustainability, privacy and education. The grants are part of Google’s broader efforts to support AI research and development worldwide.
Sarah Al Husseini, Google’s head of public policy in Saudi Arabia, emphasized the company’s commitment to empowering local researchers and institutions to develop solutions that benefit users, businesses and governments in an AI-driven world.
She said: “Google is committed to empowering local researchers and institutions to introduce relevant solutions to users, businesses and governments in an AI-first world. By investing in pioneering research with KAUST, we hope to continue fostering multilingual, multimodal machine learning breakthroughs that will benefit the region and beyond.”
Gianluca Setti, dean of the CEMSE division at KAUST, welcomed the collaboration.

“It is great to see Google recognize the caliber of talent in KAUST's CEMSE faculty,” he said. “These grants will allow our faculty to strengthen the efforts in multilingual, multimodal machine learning, and the development of LLMs in areas with tremendous potential for societal impact.”

Grant recipients include Bernard Ghanem, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering and computer science, who will work on redefining traditional continual learning setups and evaluation; Tareq Al-Naffouri, professor of electrical and computer engineering, who will develop a flexible and efficient open radio access network infrastructure; and Mohamed Elhoseiny, assistant professor in computer science, in a study titled “No Culture Left Behind: Assistive Multilingual Vision LLMs for Cultural and Cross-Cultural Vision-Language Understanding.”

Other faculty members who received grants are Di Wang, assistant professor of computer science, and Xin Gao, professor of computer science. Google will also pair each faculty awardee with a Google researcher who can serve as their sponsor.

The grants coincide with KAUST’s announcement of a new Center of Excellence in Generative AI with Ghanem as its chair. The center aims to accelerate and establish excellence in generative AI research and development in the Kingdom.

RIYADH: The head of Saudi Arabia’s Project Masam said there is still a long way to go despite the project having cleared more than 450,000 landmines and explosive remnants of war in Yemen.

“There is still a long way to go to reach a mine-free Yemen”, the project’s managing director, Ousama Al-Gosaibi, said in a statement.

Since at least 2015, Houthi militias have planted landmines — conventional and improvised — in “quantities and sophistication that far exceeds reasonable limits,” Al-Gosaibi said

Masam is a humanitarian land mine clearance project in Yemen launched by Saudi Arabia in 2018. Since launching, Masam teams have cleared more than 450,000 explosive items, the statement said.

Al-Gosaibi said the project continues to perform its work in “exceptional circumstances in every sense of the word, most notably that the military operations and mine-laying operations have not stopped yet.”

He also noted how difficult the work is because of the lack of minefield maps and “the difficulty of the terrain” in which minefields are located or suspected to be located.

Houthi militias continue to advance and evolve the manufacture and planting of these landmines across Yemeni land, he claimed.

Given the difficult circumstances, Al-Gosaibi praised the Yemeni people’s cooperation with the project’s de-mining teams, who in part rely on civilian reports of suspected minefields to carry out their operations.

In that regard, the managing director highlighted the success of awareness-raising campaigns — known as explosive ordnance risk education — aimed at educating the public about the dangers of mines and how to behave should they suspect the presence of landmines or explosive devices.