The third edition of Machines Can See (MCS) Summit has concluded at Dubai’s Museum of the Future. More than 300 start‑ups pitched to investors from EQT Ventures, Balderton, Lakestar, e& capital and Mubadala, and more than 3,500 delegates from 45 countries attended the summit, while online engagement levels were high (4.7 million views). Real-time updates with the #MCS2025 hashtag are projected to exceed 5 million views.
The summit was hosted by UAE-based Polynome Group under the patronage of H.H. Sheikh Hamdan bin Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum. Strategic backers included Digital Dubai, Dubai Police, Emirates, Amazon Web Services, NVIDIA, IBM, SAP, MBZUAI among others.
“In just three years, MCS has evolved from a specialist meet‑up into a true crossroads for the world’s top minds in science, business and public policy. The week proved that when researchers, entrepreneurs and governments share one stage, we move a step closer to transparent, human‑centred AI that delivers real value for society,” said Alexander Khanin, founder & CEO of Polynome Group
Landmark agreements announced live on stage
During the two‑day programme, several high‑profile agreements were signed at the summit, including:
- A trilateral Memorandum of Understanding between Astana Hub (Kazakhstan), IT‑Park Uzbekistan and Al‑Farabi Innovation Hub (UAE), creating a Central‑Asia‑to‑MENA soft‑landing platform for high‑growth start‑ups.
- A Google Cloud initiative offering no‑cost “Gen‑AI Leader” learning paths and discounted certification vouchers to accelerate responsible AI adoption across the region.
Polynome Group officially launched AI Academy, an educational initiative developed in collaboration with the Abu Dhabi School of Management and supported by NVIDIA’s Deep Learning Institute. The Academy will offer short executive seminars and a specialised four‑month Mini‑MBA in AI, aimed at equipping leaders and innovators with practical AI knowledge to bridge the gap between technology research and commercial application.
Policy & talent
Day one opened with a ministerial round‑table – “Wanted: AI to Retain and Attract Talent to the Country.” Ministers Omar Sultan Al Olama (UAE), Amr Talaat (Egypt), Gobind Singh Deo (Malaysia), Zhaslan Madiyev (Kazakhstan) and Meutya Hafid (Indonesia) detailed visa‑fast‑track programmes, national GPU clouds and cross‑border sandboxes designed to reverse brain‑drain and accelerate R&D.
Breakthrough research
- Prof. Michael Bronstein (University of Oxford/Google DeepMind) demonstrated Geometric Deep Learning applications that shorten drug‑discovery timelines and model subatomic physics.
- Marco Tempest (NASA JPL/MagicLab.nyc) blended GPT‑4o dialogue with mixed‑reality holograms, turning the stage into an interactive mind‑map.
- Prof. Michal Irani (Weizmann Institute) showed perception‑to‑cognition systems capable of reconstructing scenes from a single gaze sequence.
- Andrea Vedaldi (Oxford) premiered a 3‑D generative‑AI pipeline for instant city‑scale digital twins, while Marc Pollefeys (ETH Zurich/Microsoft) demonstrated real‑time spatial mapping at sub‑10 ms latency.
Industry workshops & panels
AWS ran a hands‑on clinic – “Building Enterprise Gen‑AI Applications” – covering RAG, agentic orchestration and secure deployment. NVIDIA’s workshop unveiled its platform approach to production generative‑AI on Hopper‑class GPUs, complementing its newly announced Service Delivery Partnership with Polynome Group’s legal entity, Intelligent Machines Consultancies. Dubai Police hosted a closed‑door DFA session on predictive policing, while X and AI workshops explored social‑data pipelines on GPU clusters.
The parallel Machines Can Create forum examined AI’s role in luxury, digital art and media, with speakers from HEC Paris, The Sandbox, IBM Research and BBC, culminating in the panel “Pixels and Palettes: The Canvas of Tomorrow.”
Prof. Marc Pollefeys, Director of the Mixed Reality and AI Lab at ETH Zurich and Microsoft, highlighted the role of cutting-edge technology in daily life: “We are at a turning point where technologies like spatial AI and real-time 3D mapping are moving from laboratories into everyday life, transforming cities, workplaces, and how we interact with the digital world. The Machines Can See Summit underscores how collaboration between researchers, industry, and policymakers accelerates this transition, bringing innovative solutions closer to everyone,” he said.
Ethical & security focus
Panels “Good AI: Between Hype and Mediocrity” and “Defending Intelligence: Navigating Adversarial Machine Learning” stressed the need for continuous audits, red‑teaming and transparent supply chains. Dubai Police, TII UAE and IBM urged adoption of ISO‑aligned governance tool‑kits to safeguard public‑sector deployments.
High‑profile awards
On Day Two, H.H. Sheikh Hamdan bin Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum presented trophies for the Global Prompt Engineering Championship, for breakthroughs in multilingual, safety-aligned LLM prompting.
Key takeaways
The summit underscored three strategic imperatives for the decade ahead. Talent aviation – backed by unified tech visas, national GPU clouds and government‑funded sandbox clusters – is emerging as the most effective antidote to AI brain‑drain. Spatial computing is moving from laboratory to street level as sub‑10‑millisecond mapping unlocks safe humanoid robotics and city‑scale augmented‑reality services. Finally, secure generative AI must couple adversarial robustness with transparent, explainable pipelines before the technology can achieve mass‑market adoption in regulated industries.
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