Eric Xing
American artificial intelligence researcher
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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.
Eric Poe Xing | |
|---|---|
邢波 | |
| |
| Born | Shanghai, China |
| Alma mater | Tsinghua University Rutgers University University of California, Berkeley |
| Spouse | Wei Wu |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Computer science |
| Institutions | Carnegie Mellon University Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence |
| Thesis | Probabilistic graphical models and algorithms for genomic analysis (2004) |
| Richard Karp Michael I. Jordan Stuart J. Russell | |
| Website | cs |
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:
- Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (2016)[29]
- Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (2019) for "contributions to machine learning algorithms and systems"[1]
- American Statistical Association (2022)[30]
- Association for Computing Machinery (2022) for "contributions to algorithms, architectures, and applications in machine learning"[2]
- Institute of Mathematical Statistics (2023)[31]
- International Society for Computational Biology (2026)[32]
Selected publications
- Eric P. Xing; Michael I. Jordan; Stuart J. Russell; Andrew Y. Ng (2003). "Distance Metric Learning with Application to Clustering with Side-Information" (PDF). Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 15. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems. Wikidata Q77691192.
- Edoardo M. Airoldi; David M. Blei; Stephen E Fienberg; Eric P Xing (1 September 2008). "Mixed Membership Stochastic Blockmodels". Journal of Machine Learning Research. 9: 1981–2014. ISSN 1533-7928. PMC 3119541. PMID 21701698. Wikidata Q35058357.
- Eric P. Xing; Michael I. Jordan; Richard M. Karp (28 June 2001), Feature selection for high-dimensional genomic microarray data, vol. 18, pp. 601–608, Wikidata Q138678867
- Xing EP; Karp RM (1 January 2001). "CLIFF: clustering of high-dimensional microarray data via iterative feature filtering using normalized cuts". Bioinformatics. 17 Suppl 1: S306-15. doi:10.1093/BIOINFORMATICS/17.SUPPL_1.S306. ISSN 1367-4803. PMID 11473022. Wikidata Q30657299.