An Introduction to the Provost, and to AI

Abstract

Lawrence Carin is the new Provost at KAUST, and he is also an expert on artificial intelligence (AI), with a recent focus on deep learning for image and document analysis. In this series of four sessions, Professor Carin will introduce himself to the KAUST community, including to faculty, students and staff. This will include a discussion of some of his experiences before joining KAUST, and initial thoughts on areas of focus as the KAUST Provost.

Professor Carin values insights and ideas from others, and this series is meant to introduce himself and start that conversation. In addition to introducing himself, Professor Carin will use this forum to discuss fundamental concepts in AI, accessible to a wide KAUST audience. An emphasis will be placed on intuition, with as little mathematics as needed to convey the concepts. The goal is to make these sessions fun, interesting and informative of one of the key areas of focus at KAUST, AI.

The series will consist of four lectures, and in these the following AI concepts will be discussed:

Lecture 1

Introduction to Basics of Deep Learning
22 February | 1:00 – 2:15 p.m.
Zoom link: https://kaust.zoom.us/j/98515276954

Lecture 2

The Convolutional Neural Network for Image Analysis
1 March | 1:00 – 2:15 p.m.
Zoom link: https://kaust.zoom.us/j/94456395577

Lecture 3

The Recurrent Neural Network for Time-Evolving Data
8 March | 1:00 – 2:15 p.m.
Zoom link: https://kaust.zoom.us/j/93259164124

Lecture 4

The Transformer Network for Natural Language Processing
22 March | 1:00 – 2:15 p.m.
Zoom link: https://kaust.zoom.us/j/93725451705

Have you missed or want to catch-up on a previous lecture? Click here!

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Brief biography

Lawrence Carin is the new Provost at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology. Prior to joining KAUST professor Carin was the James L. Meriam Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Duke University, where he also served as the Vice President for Research. He is one of the most prolific authors in the world in the fields of machine learning and artificial intelligence, regularly publishing in the most competitive forums. Dr. Carin had taught at Duke for over 25 years, and has published nearly 400 peer-reviewed papers.

Lawrence Carin earned the BS, MS, and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering at the University of Maryland, College Park, in 1985, 1986, and 1989, respectively. In 1989 he joined the Electrical Engineering Department at Polytechnic University (Brooklyn) as an Assistant Professor, and became an Associate Professor there in 1994. In September 1995 he joined the Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) Department at Duke University. He was ECE Department Chair from 2011-2014, the Vice Provost for Research from 2014-2019, and since 2019 he has served as Duke’s Vice President for Research.

From 2003-2014 he held the William H. Younger Distinguished Professorship, and since 2018 he has held the James L. Meriam Distinguished Professorship. Dr. Carin’s research focuses on machine learning (ML), artificial intelligence (AI) and applied statistics. He publishes widely in the main ML/AI conferences, and he has also engaged in translation of research to practice. He was co-founder of the small business Signal Innovations Group, which was acquired by BAE Systems in 2014, and in 2017 he co-founded the company Infinia ML. He is an IEEE Fellow.