Carin Lawrence

Dr. Lawrence Carin, the former Vice President for Research at Duke University, has been named KAUST Provost. At Duke, Carin held the James L. Meriam and William H. Younger Distinguished Professorship in Engineering and was the Chair of the Electrical & Computer Engineering Department and Vice Provost for Research.

As KAUST Provost, Carin will provide strategic and administrative leadership in all matters pertaining to faculty, students and education programs, including recruitment, retention, promotion, and talent development, as well as curriculum, dual/joint degrees, online and continuing education, and new academic programs.

Carin is a world-class researcher in the areas of AI & Machine Learning. Across all fields of computer science he is ranked #435 worldwide and #279 in the U.S. His background in AI is highly complimentary to the new digital thematic priority at KAUST, and will help attract top-caliber talent to the Kingdom. He is a Fellow of the Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) since 2001, and has co-authored over 450 academic papers with a Google Scholar H-Index of 86. 

As the Lead of the Duke Science & Technology Initiative (where several U.S. National Academic Members were hired) and through his other administrative positions at Duke, Carin has a strong track record of recruiting pre-eminent faculty. As part of his role as Vice President for Research, he oversaw the Duke Office of Licensing and Ventures. He also co-founded the Signal Innovations group (acquired by BAE Systems in 2014) and established Infinia ML to commercialize his research in AI/ML.

Prior to his tenure at Duke, Carin held assistant and associate professor positions at the Polytechnic University in Brooklyn (now New York University Tandon School of Engineering), New York. He received his doctoral, master's and bachelor's degrees in Electrical Engineering at the University of Maryland, College Park.

Jürgen Schmidhuber

Schmidhuber earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Technical University of Munich (TUM). He is a co-founder and the chief scientist of the company NNAISENSE, and was most recently scientific director at the Swiss AI Lab, IDSIA, and professor of AI at the University of Lugano. He is also the recipient of numerous awards, author of more than 350 peer-reviewed papers, a frequent keynote speaker, and an adviser to various governments on AI strategies.

His lab's deep learning neural networks have revolutionized machine learning and AI. By the mid-2010s, they were implemented on more than three billion devices, and used billions of times per day by customers of the world's most valuable public companies' products, e.g., for greatly improved speech recognition on all Android phones, greatly improved machine translation through Google Translate and Facebook (more than four billion translations per day), Apple's Siri and Quicktype on all iPhones, the answers of Amazon's Alexa, and numerous other applications.

In 2011, his team was the first to win official computer vision contests through deep neural nets with superhuman performance. In 2012, they had the first deep neural network to win a medical imaging contest (on cancer detection), attracting enormous interest from industry. His research group also established the fields of artificial curiosity through generative adversarial neural networks, linear transformers and networks that learn to program other networks (since 1991), and mathematically rigorous universal AI and recursive self-improvement in meta-learning machines that learn to learn (since 1987).

Paulo Esteves-Veríssimo

Paulo Esteves-Veríssimo is since November 2020 a professor at KAUST, and Director of the Resilient Computing and Cybersecurity Center (RC3). Previously, he has been a professor and FNR PEARL Chair at the University of Luxembourg FSTM, and Head of the CritiX Research Lab at SnT center at the same University. CritiX has achieved world-class results and enduring capacity of research in resilient computing, cybersecurity and dependability. Previously, he had also been a Professor of the University of Lisbon (Portugal) and Member of the Board of the same university. There, he created the Navigators research group and was later founding Director of LaSIGE in 1998, a computer science and engineering lab, whose research in cutting-edge areas has consistently been backed by key indicators of excellence until today.

He was the representative of UNILU-SnT in ECSO, the European Cyber Security Organization, and member of its Scientific & Technical Committee (STC), as well as Chair of the IFIP WG 10.4 on Dependable Computing and Fault-Tolerance and vice-Chair of the Steering Committee of the IEEE/IFIP DSN conference. He is a Fellow of the IEEE and a Fellow of the ACM, and an associate editor of IEEE Transactions on Emerging Topics in Computing (TETC).

William Sanders

Dr. William H. Sanders became Dean of Carnegie Mellon University’s College of Engineering in 2020. Before coming to Carnegie Mellon, he spent twenty-five years at the University of Illinois in various faculty and leadership roles. In 2018, he was appointed as the interim director of the Discovery Partners Institute, a purpose-driven, collaborative research institute focused on building prosperity for all through technology-based economic growth. During his time at the University of Illinois, he spent six years as the head of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and director of both the Information Trust Institute and the Coordinated Science Lab. He received his B.S. in Computer Engineering (’83), M.S.E. in Computer, Information and Control Engineering (’85), and Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering (’88), all from the University of Michigan. Over the course of his research career, Sanders has published more than 270 technical papers in the areas of secure and dependable computing, and resiliency metrics and evaluation for critical infrastructures. He created some of the earliest secure power grid architectures, as well as the assessment tools and metrics to quantify smart grid resilience. In 2005, he was the Principal Investigator of the NSF-supported center-scale power grid program, which brought together prominent universities with major utilities and power grid equipment vendors in the first ever university-industry-government partnership for power system cybersecurity. The center was the first to propose a comprehensive architecture for a secure smart grid through further development of the resiliency mechanisms pioneered earlier by Sanders. In addition to these prestigious accomplishments, Sanders has received numerous academic and industry awards, including the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Technical Field Award, Innovation in Societal Infrastructure. He is an elected fellow of IEEE, the Association for Computing Machinery, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, as well as the co-founder of Network Perception Inc.