Rate My Professor Merouane Debbah

Prof. Merouane Debbah is Professor at Khalifa University of Science and Technology in Abu Dhabi and founding Senior Director of the KU Digital Future Institute. He is a public speaker, educator, and technology entrepreneur who has founded multiple public and industrial research centers and start-ups and held executive positions in ICT companies. He is a frequent keynote speaker at international events in the fields of telecommunications and AI. His research lies 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 communications field, he has contributed to the development of small cells for 4G, massive MIMO for 5G, and large intelligent surfaces for 6G technologies. In the AI field, he is known for work on large language models, distributed AI systems for networks, and semantic communications.

Debbah received his PhD from École normale supérieure Paris-Saclay in 2002. He has received more than 50 IEEE best paper awards and more than 100 patents. He is an IEEE Fellow, a WWRF Fellow, a Eurasip Fellow, an AAIA Fellow, an Institut Louis Bachelier Fellow, an AIIA Fellow, and a Membre émérite SEE. According to research.com, he is ranked as the best scientist in France in the field of electronics and electrical engineering. His recent work includes the development of NOOR, the largest Arabic language model at its 2022 release; Falcon LLM, the top-ranked open-source large language model at its 2023 release; and the Falcon Foundation in 2024. In 2024, he pioneered TelecomGPT, the first comprehensive large language model tailored for the telecom domain, and contributed to Large Perceptive Models integrating multimodal IoT signals, real-time optimization, and intent-driven automation. In 2025, he was named one of the "50 Leaders at the Forefront of an AI-Driven Future in the Middle East" and one of the "Arab's Most Influential Leaders in Tech."