Biography
Jürgen Schmidhuber is the co-chair of the Center of Excellence for Generative AI (GenAI) at KAUST and a professor in the Computer Science Program within the Computer, Electrical and Mathematical Sciences and Engineering (CEMSE) Division. Before joining KAUST, he served as the Director of the Swiss AI Lab, IDSIA, and was a professor of Artificial Intelligence at the University of Lugano (USI) from 2009 to 2021.
Dr. Schmidhuber earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Technical University of Munich (TUM), Germany, in 1991. He is a co-founder and chief scientist of NNAISENSE and has authored over 350 peer-reviewed papers. He is a recognized keynote speaker and adviser on AI strategies to various governments.
His pioneering work in deep learning neural networks has significantly impacted AI, with applications in speech recognition, machine translation, and personal assistants like Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa. His research group was the first to achieve superhuman performance in official computer vision contests and won a medical imaging contest in 2012.
At KAUST, Professor Schmidhuber collaborates on AI research projects, contributes to developing AI-related educational programs, and engages with public and private sector organizations in Saudi Arabia and globally.
Research Interests
Professor Schmidhuber is a founding leader in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning. At KAUST, he leads and works with many current faculty members with research interests in AI.
He spearheads the research focus on AI applications across various fields, including health care, drug design, chemistry, materials science, speech recognition, natural language processing, automation, robotics and soft robotics.
