Ling Shao

Ling Shao (邵岭) is a scientist and entrepreneur in artificial intelligence. He was the founding CEO and Chief Scientist of the Inception Institute of Artificial Intelligence (IIAI) in Abu Dhabi, the United Arab Emirates. He also founded the world's first AI university – Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence, for which he served as its Provost and Executive Vice-President from 2019 to 2021. In recognition of his scientific contributions to the UAE, 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.

Ling Shao has been elected a Fellow of the IEEE, the IAPR, the IET and the British Computer Society.

Education
Ling Shao received his B.Eng. degree in Electronic and Information Engineering from the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) in 2001. He received his M.Sc. and Ph.D. (D.Phil.) degrees from the University of Oxford in 2002 and 2005, respectively.

Career and Research
After completing his Ph.D., Ling Shao worked as a Senior Scientist at Philips Research in Eindhoven, the Netherlands from 2005 to 2009. From 2009 to 2017, he held senior academic positions at several British universities, including Senior Lecturer at the University of Sheffield and Chair Professor at the University of East Anglia. He also worked shortly as a Chief Scientist at JD.com in Beijing, China in 2017, and as CTO and Chief Scientist at Saudi Data and AI Authority (SDAIA) in Riyadh, KSA in 2022.

Shao's research interests include computer vision, machine learning, generative AI, medical image analysis and vision and language.