The Dubai AI Festival 2025 proudly welcomes Dr. Antoine Bordes, Vice President of AI at Helsing, as one of its distinguished speakers. A leading figure in global artificial intelligence research and application, Dr. Bordes brings deep expertise spanning frontier AI science, strategic defense technology, and ethical innovation.
His unique career—combining academic rigor, industry-defining AI research, and cutting-edge applications in security—positions him at the intersection of some of today’s most urgent and high-impact AI conversations.
From FAIR to Helsing: A Journey Through the Core of AI Advancement
Before joining Helsing, a European defense AI company building software to protect democratic values, Dr. Bordes spent nine years at Meta’s Fundamental AI Research (FAIR) laboratory, one of the world’s most prestigious AI research institutions. For the last three years of his tenure, he served as FAIR’s Co-Managing Director, where he helped steer some of Meta’s most foundational research in natural language processing, computer vision, machine learning, and representation learning.
During his time at FAIR, he led teams that made major contributions to open science and large-scale model development, helping lay the groundwork for many of the AI systems now being deployed across the tech ecosystem.
Academic Excellence and Research Pioneering
Dr. Bordes earned his Ph.D. in Artificial Intelligence from Sorbonne University in 2010, where his thesis received two prestigious awards:
- Best Ph.D. from the French Association for Artificial Intelligence
- Best Ph.D. from the French Armament Agency (DGA)
Prior to joining Meta (then Facebook) in 2014, he was a research scientist at CNRS in France and a postdoctoral fellow in Yoshua Bengio’s lab at the University of Montreal—placing him among the early contributors to deep learning’s global rise.
He has authored over 60 academic papers, with a cumulative 50,000+ citations, making him one of the most widely referenced researchers in his field.
Keynote at Dubai AI Festival 2025: Strategic AI for Democratic Resilience
At the Dubai AI Festival 2025, Dr. Antoine Bordes will deliver a keynote titled:
“From Research to Reality: Strategic AI in the Age of Global Uncertainty.”
His session will offer a rare and timely look into:
- The evolution of fundamental AI research into real-world, mission-critical applications
- The importance of AI sovereignty, ethics, and democratic alignment in defense and public sector use
- Responsible innovation practices across dual-use technologies
- Lessons from building FAIR and transitioning to applied AI in high-stakes environments
Dr. Bordes’ talk will resonate deeply with AI researchers, defense experts, policymakers, and technology leaders focused on how AI can be deployed safely, responsibly, and strategically in complex, global contexts.
Dr. Antoine Bordes’ presence at the Dubai AI Festival 2025 represents a unique convergence of academic depth, applied innovation, and principled leadership in artificial intelligence. His contributions underscore the critical importance of building AI not only with capability—but with conscience.
