NYUAD Institute

2018.10.15 In October 2017, the UAE has released the first national Artificial intelligence (AI) strategy recognized as the first strategy of this caliber in the region and the world. The strategy is meant to highlight the framework of the first project in the UAE centennial 2071 and an initial step in 2021 roadmaps. The AI initiative in the UAE is aimed at focusing on revolutionizing technology,...

2018.10.07 Distinguished and award-winning novelist, Elias Khoury, discusses his work and the Arab novel in general as it has developed over the last ten years. Ten years ago he discussed his celebrated Bab al-Shams. This evening he considers his own work and how the Arab literary scene has developed since the inaugural Institute event he took part in October 2008. Speakers Elias Khoury, Lebanese...

March 12, 2018 Part of "Evolution Across Disciplines" African human genomic diversity is highly understudied and this also true for African-descended individuals in the Americas (New World Africans). Yet these data form the foundation for subsequent sophisticated applied work in genetics and genomics of relevance to all peoples of African descent (e.g., in pharmacogenomics, metabolomics, epigenomi...

April 16, 2018 What is a citizen scholar? What kind of scholarly research captures the attention of the general public and how can we optimize public engagement in it? What is the role of the digital humanities that have become so relevant in western and non-western academic contexts in recent decades? This talk introduces the notion of open social scholarship that involves creating and disseminat...

April 9, 2018 In the 1970’s Ireland was a poor agricultural society with one of the lowest standards of living in Northern Europe. By 1985 per capita GDP stood at 70% of the European Union’s core 15 states. By 2007, it had doubled to 140%. GDP Growth will be 3.5% (2018) and Ireland will remain the EU’s fastest growing economy until 2024. The Global Innovation index 2017 ranked Ireland 10th between...

March 27, 2018 The dispossession and forced migration of nearly 50 percent of Syria's population has produced the greatest refugee crisis since World War II. This talk places the current displacement within the context of the widespread migrations that have indelibly marked the region throughout the last 150 years. Syria itself has harbored millions from its neighboring lands, and Syrian society h...

April 30, 2018 Gender diversity in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) is a global challenge in this rapidly growing industry. Experts studying the gender ratio in STEM have found that it is far more balanced in the Arab world than in the West. The many examples of highly successful women entrepreneurs in the technology sector emerging from Arab countries is contrasted with some remai...

March 7, 2018 Enslaved Africans and their descendants contributed in vital ways to the economy and culture of eastern Arabia. Global economic forces, especially international demand for Gulf pearls and dates, drove demand in the Gulf for slave labor from Africa. The reversal of those trends in the 1930s spelled economic collapse for the Gulf and an eventual end to the slave trade. This talk traces...

April 11, 2018 The National Pavilion UAE’s architecture exhibition at this year’s Venice Biennale explores human-scale architectural landscapes and aims to highlight the role of architecture and urban design in forming the choreography of people’s daily routines. The interplay between the physicality of architecture and places, and the dynamic choreography of everyday life will be investigated thr...

March 25, 2018 Over the past few years, the science from the 100-meter Green Bank Telescope has ranged from discovering complex organic molecules in space, searching for elusive gravitational waves, scanning the skies for signals from alien civilizations, mapping swarms of hydrogen clouds which are streaming away from our galaxy, and unearthing new facts to help us understand how planets form. Thi...

April 1, 2018 This talk addresses how the racialization of Arab Americans differed in timing from that of other racialized groups in the US, even though many of its ideological aspects (essentializing) and outcomes (discrimination, surveillance, and hate crimes) are shared. The racialization of Arabs foreshadowed the racialization of US Muslims and South Asians as terror threats. This history shou...

April 23, 2018 This talk examines why the large-scale forces that have already transformed the global economy – globalization and the shift in economic activity toward the emerging economies in the Global South, the exponential rise in the speed and sophistication of information technology, and the blurring of traditional categories of organization and thought – are producing “disruptive innovatio...

March 29, 2018 For a long time, Emirati women were mainly associated with the concealed space of the domestic household and considered as the guardians and transmitters of Emirati tradition and religious values. During the last years, however, Emirati women figure more prominently on the public stage – not least due to a variety of state-sponsored programs aiming at the empowerment of women, parti...

March 5, 2018 The elimination of extreme poverty has been recognized as a global goal. Extreme Poverty was defined in the 1990s by the World Bank in terms of its famous ‘$-a-day’ poverty line. The line has been controversial, in part because it is not clear how anyone could live on one dollar per day. This talk examines a more transparent approach. This new approach is based on people’s needs for...

2018.03.22 In 1941, the largest, bloodiest war ever broke out between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. Worldwide, some 55 million people were killed in WWII, half in the Soviet Union. Who was Joseph Stalin? Who was Adolf Hitler? Why did they clash? This talk, based upon a book of the same name, uses a vast array of once secret documents to trace the parallel rise of Soviet Communism and Nazism a...

Sunday, January 28, 2018 In the last 15 years, people’s understanding of how the Solar System evolved into what we observe today has greatly expanded. This became possible as advances in scientific computing enabled us to fully explore a wealth of observational data and -- more importantly -- the powerful theory of Celestial Mechanics, going far beyond its traditional boundaries. As a result, a ne...

January 4, 2018 Billions of people, and billions of their animals, still harbor infections with various types of parasitic worms (helminths). These infections are not usually acutely lethal, but they reduce growth and productivity and contribute to the cycle of poverty. Impressive achievements in the development of new strategies for parasite control have led to the near eradication of human infec...

January 15, 2018 The arrival of massive amounts of data from imaging, sensors, computation and the internet brought with it significant challenges for data science. New methods for analysis and manipulation of big data have come from many scientific disciplines. The first focus of this talk is the application of ideas from differential equations, such as variational principles and numerical diffus...

January 9, 2018 Until very recently, fraternal polyandry was the traditional marriage form observed by ethnic Tibetan people of many high Himalayan valleys. In this type of marriage, women marry a set of brothers, co-reside with them, and can bear children to all of them. Polyandry is rare among mammals, and is almost unknown among humans. Indeed, it challenges many common assumptions about marria...

12/12/2017 his talk showcases a little-known gem of medieval Arabic creative literature, the Da`wat al-Aṭibbā’ or Doctors' Dinner Party by Ibn Butlan (d.1066 CE). This text is an important, but little-known, milestone in the history of pre-modern Arabic narrative. This talk also focuses on the significance of the work along with the challenges of translating such a work into English in the 21st ce...

11/26/2017 People live in an era of smart cities empowered by Autonomous systems, FinTech technologies, Quantum computations and Artificial Intelligence. The new-age information revolution is pushing the limits of all electronic representations in terms of computational complexity, power, and area. The security of any hardware devices, embedded systems and generic system used within these environm...

12/07/2017 A machine plays the strategy game ‘Go’ better than any human; upstarts like Apple and Google destroy industry stalwarts such as Nokia; ideas from the crowd are repeatedly more innovative than corporate research labs. In this talk, MIT’s Andrew McAfee discusses what it takes to master this digital-powered shift and delves into topics surrounding how individuals must rethink the integrati...

11/15/2017 Most people have experienced the close links between their body rhythms and mood. For example, changes in sleep-wake cycle during jet lag can temporarily affect mood. In light of the fact that most people feel good, and function better, after a good night’s sleep, it is surprising that sleep deprivation therapy can rapidly treat depression in psychiatric patients. One of the leading hyp...

11/19/2017 Date palms are the most significant food crop in the Middle East and North Africa and are one of the few crop species that thrive in hot and dry environments. How did this important food crop evolve? Where did they come from? What are the genes that make different date palm varieties unique? This talk explores the evolution and genetics of date palms as uncovered by research at the NYU...

10/30/2017 Based on his new book, Keeping It Halal: The Everyday Lives of Muslim American Teenage Boys (Princeton University Press, 2017), sociologist John O’Brien provides a uniquely personal look at the social worlds of a group of young male friends as they navigate the complexities of growing up Muslim in America. This talk offers a portrait of Muslim American teenage boys concerned with typica...