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.
He earned a Ph.D. in molecular biology and biochemistry from Rutgers in 1999, supervised by molecular cancer researcher Chung S. Yang. 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. 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.
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.
He served as co-Program Chair of the International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) in 2014 and General Chair in 2019.
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.
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. In 2018 Petuum was named a World Economic Forum Technology Pioneer. In 2019, Xing received the Carnegie Science Award for Startup Entrepreneurs in recognition of his leadership of Petuum.
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.
In 2024, Xing co-founded GenBio AI
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.
Xing has overseen the launch of the MBZUAI Institute of Foundation Models (IFM), which focuses on research and development of large-scale foundation models. 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. IFM presented PAN as a “world model” research project and demonstrated related systems publicly. 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.
