Technology Innovation Institute (TII)
Technology Innovation Institute develops Falcon within Abu Dhabi's government research system. TII is the applied research arm of the Advanced Technology Research Council. Its work also covers cryptography, robotics, quantum technology, materials and other fields.
Company & leadership
- Founding institution
- Abu Dhabi's Advanced Technology Research Council (ATRC)
- Chief executive officer
- Dr. Najwa Aaraj
- Governance
- Part of Abu Dhabi Government's Advanced Technology Research Council
- AI research leadership
- Dr. Hakim Hacid, Chief Researcher for Artificial Intelligence and Digital Science
How Abu Dhabi established the institute
ATRC publicly introduced TII in November 2020 after its first board meeting that August. The institute began with seven research centers. Its launch announcement described long-term research funding, intellectual property development and partnerships with more than 20 universities. TII was established as a research institution within a government program, rather than a founder-owned AI startup.
Leadership across several research fields
Najwa Aaraj became CEO on 21 May 2024. She succeeded Ray O. Johnson, TII's first CEO. Before the appointment, Aaraj led its cryptography and autonomous robotics research centers. This background connects the institute's AI work with secure computing and physical systems.
The current leadership page also names Chaouki Kasmi as Chief Innovation Officer. Its AI and Digital Science center is led by Hakim Hacid. Yoelle Maarek leads the AI Cross Center Unit for AI and information retrieval.
How the Falcon program expanded
In May 2025, the Falcon team released H1 as six model sizes with base and instruction-tuned variants. Its design put attention and Mamba state-space processing in parallel within each block. This was a separate architectural direction from the earlier Falcon transformer models.
TII introduced Falcon Emirati, Falcon ASR and Falcon OCR Arabic in October 2026. These releases extend its regional work from general Arabic text to Emirati dialect, speech transcription and document reading. Their public access differs from the downloadable H1 checkpoints.