Professor

Title:

Large Language Models: The Falcon case study

Time: Wednesday, May 1st 2024, 08:00 – 09:00

 

Abstract:

In this talk, we will introduce the Falcon series which are causal decoder-only models trained on a diverse high-quality corpora predominantly assembled from web data. The largest model, Falcon-180B, has been trained on over 3.5 trillion tokens of text–the largest openly documented pretraining run. We will discuss in detail on the challenges and opportunities offered by Open Source Large Language Models as well the main applications in the field of Telecommunication.

 

Biography:

Mérouane Debbah is a researcher, educator and technology entrepreneur. Over his career, he has founded several public and industrial research centers, start-ups and is now Professor at Khalifa University of Science and Technology in Abu Dhabi and founding Director of the KU 6G Research Center. He is also the Chief Scientific AI Advisor at the Technology Innovation Institute. He is a frequent keynote speaker at international events in the field of telecommunication and AI. His research has been lying at the interface of fundamental mathematics, algorithms, statistics, information and communication sciences with a special focus on random matrix theory and learning algorithms. In the Communication field, he has been at the heart of the development of small cells (4G), Massive MIMO (5G) and Large Intelligent Surfaces (6G) technologies. In the AI field, he is known for his work on Large Language Models, distributed AI systems for networks and semantic communications. He received multiple prestigious distinctions, prizes and best paper awards (more than 40 IEEE best paper awards) for his contributions to both fields and according to research.com is ranked as the best scientist in France in the field of Electronics and Electrical Engineering. He is an IEEE Fellow, a WWRF Fellow, a Eurasip Fellow, an AAIA Fellow, an Institut Louis Bachelier Fellow and a Membre émérite SEE. His recent work led to the development of NOOR (upon it release, largest language model in Arabic) released in 2022, Falcon LLM (upon its release, top ranked open source large language model) released in 2023 and the Falcon Foundation in 2024. The Falcon Model Series and The Falcon Foundation have positioned the UAE as a global leader in the generative AI field. He is a member of the Marconi Prize Selection Advisory Committee.