Timothy Baldwin

Tim Baldwin is Provost and Professor of Natural Language Processing at Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence, in addition to holding a Melbourne Laureate Professor position at the University of Melbourne and serving as Chief Scientist of LibrAI, a start-up focused on AI safety. He was appointed provost in April 2024, following his earlier roles as Chair of the NLP Department and Associate Provost at MBZUAI starting in 2022.

Baldwin completed a BSc in Computer Science and Mathematics, and a BA in Linguistics and Japanese from the University of Melbourne in 1995, followed by an MEng in Computer Science and PhD in Computer Science from the Tokyo Institute of Technology in 1998 and 2001. He worked as a Senior Research Engineer at Stanford University's Center for the Study of Language and Information before taking a faculty position at the University of Melbourne in 2004, where he spent 17 years before relocating to Abu Dhabi.

Baldwin is the author of around 500 peer-reviewed publications across natural language processing and AI, with over 25,000 citations, and has received numerous prestigious awards at top NLP conferences. He is a co-developer of widely used language models for Arabic, English, and Indonesian, with over 1 million downloads on Huggingface. His notable recent achievements at MBZUAI include co-leading the technical development of Jais, an open-source bilingual Arabic-English model, and publishing 23 papers in 2023 alone while receiving awards at conferences including EACL 2023 and SEM 2023.

Career history

• Provost, Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (April 2024–present)
• Acting Provost and Chair of Natural Language Processing Department, MBZUAI (2022–2024)
• Melbourne Laureate Professor, University of Melbourne (2004–2022)
• Senior Research Engineer, Center for the Study of Language and Information, Stanford University

What Timothy Baldwin could bring to MBZUAI as Provost: Baldwin's proven track record in NLP research excellence, combined with his hands-on leadership of MBZUAI's rapid expansion, positions him to advance the university's global standing in AI education and research. His expertise in multilingual AI models, particularly Arabic language processing, aligns strategically with the UAE's AI 2031 vision, while his establishment of new academic departments and recruitment of faculty demonstrate capability to sustain institutional growth and academic rigor.