Ling Shao

Dr. Ling Shao was the founder of both the Inception Institute of Artificial Intelligence (IIAI) and the Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI), the world's first AI university. He also served as the CEO of IIAI (2018-2021) and simultaneously as the Provost and Executive Vice-President of MBZUAI (2019-2021). IIAI and MBZUAI have been pivotal in advancing AI research in the UAE since 2018. Moreover, he was a key founding member (employee #1) and the Chief Scientist of Group 42 (G42), a leading AI and advanced technology group headquartered in Abu Dhabi. In recognition of his scientific contributions, he was awarded the Mohammed bin Rashid Medal for Scientific Distinguishment, the highest scientific honor in the UAE, by His Highness Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, the Prime-Minister and Vice-President of the UAE, and the Ruler of Dubai.

Dr. Shao received his B.Eng. in Electronic and Information Engineering from the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC), his M.Sc. in Medical Image Analysis and his Ph.D. (D.Phil.) in Computer Vision from the University of Oxford. He previously held positions of Chair Professor in Computer Vision and Machine Learning at the University of East Anglia (2016-2018), Chair Professor in Computer Vision and Machine Intelligence at Northumbria University (2014-2016), Senior Lecturer at the University of Sheffield (2009-2014), and Senior Scientist at Philips Research in the Netherlands (2005-2009). His research interests include Computer Vision, Generative AI, Multimodal AI, Vision and Language, and AI for Healthcare. He has authored/co-authored over 500 papers in top conferences/journals, including CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, TPAMI and IJCV, and holds over 30 US/EU patents.

Dr. Shao has served on the editorial boards of IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems, IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology, IEEE Transactions on Cybernetics, and several other journals. He has edited four books and several special issues for journals such as IJCV. He was the General Chair for BMVC 2018, and has been an Area Chair or Program Committee member for numerous top conferences. He was selected as a 'Highly Cited Researcher' by the Web of Science (Clarivate) for 7 consecutive years in 2018-2024. He is an elected Fellow of the IEEE, the IAPR, the British Computer Society, and the IET. He was elected as a Member of the Mohammed bin Rashid Academy of Scientists (the National Academy of the UAE) in 2021.