Yaser Al-Onaizan

Dr. Yaser Al-Onaizan is the CEO of the National Center for AI (NCAI), the AI innovation, research, and development arm of the Saudi Data and AI Authority (SDAIA). He is currently leading a team of 600+ scientists and Engineers building Saudi Arabia’s national Arabic LLM. Yaser joined NCAI in January of 2022 as its deputy CEO and Chief Scientist and became its CEO in November of 2023. Prior to returning to Saudi, he led many Center. He was at Amazon from 2017 until 2022. He led their AI Languages Labs with a 100+ team of scientists and engineers spanning many geographies responsible for many of their speech and language AIservices. He also helped establish AWS AI presence in NYC. Prior to joining Amazon, He spent 15 years in IBM Research and Watson Group. He led many of their language efforts (neural machine translation, speech translation, multilingual information extraction, medical coding, etc.). Throughout his 15 years at IBM, he led many DARPA multi-year projects with teams from IBM and many top universities across the globe (e.g., Stanford, JHU, CMU, MIT, UMD, RWTH in Germany, Cambridge in the UK, etc.). Dr. Yaser hold a MS. and Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Southern California, Information Sciences Institute. He also has an MBA from Columbia University. Throughout his distinguished career, he has won many awards. He also published over 60 referred scientific papers and holds more than 20 patents. He is a senior member of many professional organizations and was program chair for many international scientific conferences. He served as Editor-in-Chief for ACM Transactions and a board member of AMTA.