In the UAE, state-funded Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI) has big plans to become the ‘Stanford of the Middle East’ — and the pitch is attracting some of Europe’s top researchers.
Those who have joined the faculty include Eric Moulines, professor of statistics at France’s prestigious École Polytechnique, and Michael Brady, professor of oncological imaging at the University of Oxford. There’s also Ted Briscoe, who was previously professor of computational linguistics at the University of Cambridge and is now professor of natural language processing at MBZUAI.
“We have a good number of very senior and accomplished researchers from European schools […] we see the European academic world as a whole as a very important resource,” MBZUAI’s president Eric Xing told Sifted during the opening event of Paris’s AI Action Summit this week organised by École Polytechnique.
For the past few years the UAE has been building up its reputation as an emerging global AI hub, attracting founders from Europe in particular with the promise of easy access to capital. That focus has extended to academia; in 2020 MBZUAI opened, offering graduate and PhD programmes in AI-related fields, such as machine learning, robotics and computer vision. Five years later, it counts nearly 400 students and 80 faculty members. Some have joined the university on a part-time basis, others have fully relocated to the UAE’s capital Abu Dhabi.
Why are European researchers heading to the UAE?
Xing, who was previously a professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University in the US, says that there’s a pretty straightforward reason that some of Europe’s top researchers might be tempted to move to Abu Dhabi to join the university.
“We provide a competitive salary, even compared to the industry,” he says, pointing out that the biggest issue Europe is facing to motivate and retain researchers is by far how little they are paid.
“I was once offered a prestigious position in the UK, and if I were to take that position, I would have had to slash my salary as a professor in the US by half,” he says.
European researchers are also attracted to the “unrestricted” financial support they get at MBZUAI up to a certain cap, depending on their seniority, to fund their research. This is in contrast to most academic institutions globally, where faculty members must write proposals in order to be given grants for their research.
“As an academic, the majority of your time is spent writing grant proposals,” says Xing. “You write 20 proposals, you get one funded. It’s a very demanding workload.”
With the funding they are given at MBZUAI, professors are able to easily hire post-doctoral students and researchers, as well as buy equipment, meaning that they spend more time writing papers, supervising students and teaching classes, says Xing.
The objective is to maximise research opportunities, which Xing says can be difficult to find in other, more established universities. “Nowadays it’s a breaking-neck competition for resources, funding, prestige, sometimes without implementing proper incentivising mechanisms for researchers,” he says.
The ‘Stanford of the Middle East’
MBZUAI wants to create a “much more open and dynamic research environment,” says Xing.
The university has a flexible policy to let faculty members hold positions outside of MBZUAI, which Xing says contrasts with most other institutions, which “treat their people as a binary asset: you are either with us, or without us.”
MBZUAI launched an ‘incubation and entrepreneurship’ centre in 2023 for those who decide to spin out their research project into a business.
In these cases the university doesn’t “insist” on keeping intellectual property (IP) rights, says Xing: “We are flexible, and are able to look at each spin-off on a case by case basis. We do have an interest in the IP, but do everything we can to make sure that the spin-off gets all the support they need first.”
In Europe it’s common practice for universities to own a researcher’s IP and to take an equity stake in any company created off the back of that research. That’s been a point of contention in the European ecosystem, with a number of universities criticised for taking too much of the companies being started by academics.
Xing did not specify how much equity the university takes in its spinouts, or the details around owning researchers’ IP.
“It’s a new formula compared to some of the older practices,” says Xing.
MBZUAI is currently growing its student base by 50% every year and plans to add undergraduate degrees in the coming years. Eventually, the university will expand to teach courses in more disciplines than AI-related fields, says Xing.
The objective is to grow the number of businesses spinning out from from the university. “I want MBZUAI to become the Stanford of the Middle East,” says Xing.
“Stanford is truly the epicentre of startups and entrepreneurship. It’s an engine for the local economy, spinning off lots of businesses and transferring tech to the surrounding companies. That’s the right model for a university.”
Read the orginal article: https://sifted.eu/articles/mbzuai-europe-researchers/
