Biography:Eric Xing

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Eric Poe Xing
邢波
File:Eric P. Xing.jpg
Born
Shanghai, China
Alma materTsinghua University
Rutgers University
University of California, Berkeley
Spouse(s)Wei Wu
Scientific career
FieldsComputer science
InstitutionsCarnegie Mellon University
Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence
ThesisProbabilistic graphical models and algorithms for genomic analysis (2004)
Doctoral advisorRichard Karp
Michael I. Jordan
Stuart J. Russell
Websitecs.cmu.edu/~epxing/

Eric Poe Xing (Chinese: 邢波) is an American computer scientist who has been serving as president of Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI) since January 2021. He is also a professor in the Carnegie Mellon University School of Computer Science where he founded the SAILING Lab in 2004, and is the co-founder of the AI companies Petuum and GenBio AI.

Xing's research focuses on statistical machine learning, probabilistic graphical models, and systems for distributed machine learning. He was elected a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in 2019 for "contributions to machine learning algorithms and systems"[1] and a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery in 2022 for "contributions to algorithms, architectures, and applications in machine learning."[2]

Education

Xing earned a B.Sc. in physics from Tsinghua University in 1993, and an M.Sc. in computer science from Rutgers University in 1998.[3]

He earned a Ph.D. in molecular biology and biochemistry from Rutgers in 1999, supervised by molecular cancer researcher Chung S. Yang.[4] His dissertation examined the inactivation of the Rb and p53 pathways in human esophageal squamous cell carcinoma.

He earned a second Ph.D. in computer science from the University of California, Berkeley in 2004, supervised by Richard Karp, Michael I. Jordan, and Stuart J. Russell.[5] His thesis applied probabilistic graphical models to motif identification and haplotype inference in genomic data.

Career

Xing joined Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) as a faculty member in 2004, where he created the Statistical Artificial Intelligence and Integrative Genomics (SAILING) Lab.[6]

He held visiting appointments from 2010 to 2011, serving as a visiting research professor at Facebook Inc. and as a visiting associate professor in the Department of Statistics at Stanford University.[7][8][9]

He served as co-Program Chair of the International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) in 2014 and General Chair in 2019.[10][11]

Xing served as the founding director of CMU’s Center for Machine Learning and Health, established in 2015 as part of the Pittsburgh Health Data Alliance, a collaboration between CMU, the University of Pittsburgh, and the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center.[12][13]

In 2016, Xing co-founded Petuum Inc., a US-based startup. In 2017, Petuum raised $93 million in a round of venture funding from SoftBank.[14] In 2018 Petuum was named a World Economic Forum Technology Pioneer.[15] In 2019, Xing received the Carnegie Science Award for Startup Entrepreneurs in recognition of his leadership of Petuum.[16]

On 29 November 2020, Xing was appointed president of the Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI), with the appointment taking effect in January 2021.[17]

In 2024, Xing co-founded GenBio AI[18][19] where he is chief scientist. The US-based startup, which he co-founded with David Baker, Ziv Bar-Joseph, Emma Lundberg, Le Song and Fred Hu, aims to create AI-driven digital organisms (AIDO) for the purposes of modeling medical treatments.[20]

Xing has overseen the launch of the MBZUAI Institute of Foundation Models (IFM), which focuses on research and development of large-scale foundation models.[21] In 2025–2026, IFM released the open-source reasoning model K2 Think, which was covered internationally as part of the UAE’s push to develop domestically controlled (“sovereign”) AI capabilities.[22][23] IFM presented PAN as a “world model” research project and demonstrated related systems publicly.[24] MBZUAI also collaborated with G42 and Cerebras Systems on the Jais language model, an open-source Arabic–English large language model released in 2023, according to Reuters.[25]

Awards and honors

Xing is a recipient of the National Science Foundation (NSF) Career Award[26] [27] and the Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship.[28]

Xing is an elected Fellow of the following institutes and associations:

Selected publications

References

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 Carnegie Mellon University (December 2018). "Machine Learning Professor Eric Xing Named 2019 IEEE Fellow" (in en). https://www.ml.cmu.edu/news/news-archive/2016-2020/2018/december/professor-eric-xing-named-2019-ieee-fellow.html. 
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 "Global computing association names 57 fellows for outstanding contributions that propel technology today". Association for Computing Machinery. January 18, 2023. https://www.acm.org/media-center/2023/january/fellows-2022. 
  3. ↑ "Eric Xing". Carnegie Mellon University. https://scholars.cmu.edu/1532-eric-xing. 
  4. ↑ Xing, Eric Poe (1999). The molecular mechanisms of human esophageal carcinogenesis: Inactivation of both the Rb and p53 pathways in human esophageal squamous cell carcinoma. School of Graduate Studies (PhD thesis). Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. Docket 9937501. ProQuest 304522107.
  5. ↑ "Probabilistic Graphical Models and Algorithms for Genomic Analysis". 2004. https://www2.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/2004/8243.html. 
  6. ↑ "Sailing Lab". https://sailing-lab.github.io/. 
  7. ↑ "UAE university vies for international recognition in AI education and research". Computer Weekly. 5 December 2023. https://www.computerweekly.com/feature/UAE-university-vies-for-international-recognition-in-AI-education-and-research. 
  8. ↑ El Chmouri, Omar; Bergen, Mark (23 May 2025). "UAE’s AI University Aims to Become Stanford of the Gulf". Bloomberg. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-05-23/uae-s-ai-university-aims-to-become-stanford-of-the-gulf. 
  9. ↑ "MBZUAI appoints Professor Dr. Eric Xing as President". 29 November 2020. https://www.mediaoffice.abudhabi/en/education/mbzuai-appoints-world-renowned-leading-ai/. 
  10. ↑ "ICML 2014 Program Committee". https://icml.cc/Conferences/2014/index/article/18.htm. 
  11. ↑ "ICML 2019 Board". https://icml.cc/Conferences/2019/Board. 
  12. ↑ "Pittsburgh Health Data Alliance Launched to Transform Health Care Through Data". 16 March 2015. https://www.upmc.com/media/news/031615-health-data-alliance. 
  13. ↑ "Foundations of Research Computing Distinguished Lecture Series: Dr. Eric Xing". 8 November 2018. https://entrepreneurship.columbia.edu/event/foundations-research-computing-distinguished-lecture-series-dr-eric-xing-professor-department-machine-learning-carnegie-mellon-university-founder-chief-executive-officer-chief-scient/. 
  14. ↑ Kolodny, Lora (10 October 2017). "A.I. startup Petuum is the latest company to get a big check from SoftBank". CNBC (NBCUniversal). https://www.cnbc.com/2017/10/10/ai-startup-petuum-gets-investment-from-softbank.html. 
  15. ↑ "Introducing the Technology Pioneers Cohort of 2018". https://widgets.weforum.org/techpioneers-2018/index.html. 
  16. ↑ "Researchers, Entrepreneurs Named 2019 Carnegie Science Award winners". Carnegie Mellon University News. March 2019. https://www.cmu.edu/news/stories/archives/2019/march/carnegie-science-award.html. 
  17. ↑ "MBZUAI appoints world-renowned academic Professor Eric Xing as President". Emirates News Agency. 29 November 2020. https://www.wam.ae/en/article/hszrbd3z-mbzuai-appoints-world-renowned-academic-professor. 
  18. ↑ "Davos 2025: The risks of a change in global order under Trump". France Médias Monde. 23 January 2025. https://www.france24.com/en/tv-shows/people-profit/20250123-davos-2025-the-risks-of-a-change-in-global-order-under-trump. 
  19. ↑ Guggenheim, Benjamin (21 April 2026). "AI & Tech Brief: The post-LLM era begins". The Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-intelligence/ai-tech-brief/2026/04/21/ai-tech-brief-post-llm-era-begins/. 
  20. ↑ Hu, Charlotte (16 January 2025). "Using AI To Predict Gene Expression". Carnegie Mellon University. https://www.cs.cmu.edu/news/2025/gene-expression. 
  21. ↑ "Abu Dhabi launches low-cost AI reasoning model in challenge to OpenAI and DeepSeek". The New York Times. 9 September 2025. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/09/technology/uae-emirates-ai-open-source.html. 
  22. ↑ "The United Arab Emirates releases a tiny but powerful AI model". WIRED. 9 September 2025. https://www.wired.com/story/uae-releases-a-tiny-but-powerful-reasoning-model/. 
  23. ↑ "UAE launches ‘sovereign’ open AI model to counter Chinese rivals". Financial Times. 2 February 2026. https://www.ft.com/content/465c717b-af26-48c1-a530-e9e6d313f96a. 
  24. ↑ "A United Arab Emirates Lab Announces Frontier AI Projects—and a New Outpost in Silicon Valley". WIRED. 22 May 2025. https://www.wired.com/story/the-united-arab-emirates-announces-frontier-ai-projects-and-a-new-lab-in-silicon-valley/. 
  25. ↑ "UAE's G42 launches open source Arabic language AI model". Reuters. 30 August 2023. https://www.reuters.com/technology/uaes-g42-launches-open-source-arabic-language-ai-model-2023-08-30/. 
  26. ↑ "CAREER: Uncovering the Process and Mechanism of Regulatory Evolution – Novel Statistical Models and Computational Algorithms for Evolutionary Genomics (Award DBI-0546594)". National Science Foundation. https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/show-award?AWD_ID=0546594. 
  27. ↑ "SCS Faculty Awards". https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~scsfacts/sloan.html. 
  28. ↑ "Fellows Database". Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. https://sloan.org/fellows-database. 
  29. ↑ "AAAI Fellows Elected in 2016". AAAI. 2016. http://www.aaai.org/Awards/fellows-list.php. 
  30. ↑ "ASA 2022 Fellows". American Statistical Association. https://www.amstat.org/docs/default-source/amstat-documents/pdfs/fellows/fellows2022.pdf. 
  31. ↑ "2023 IMS Fellows Announced". 2 May 2023. https://imstat.org/2023/05/02/2023-ims-fellows-announced/. 
  32. ↑ "April 21, 2026: ISCB Announces the 2026 Class of Fellows!". 21 April 2026. https://www.iscb.org/about-iscb/society-communications/announcements/april-21-2026-iscb-announces-the-2026-class-of-fellows. 



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