Rate My Professor Hanan Salam

Hanan Salam is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at New York University Abu Dhabi, serving in a tenure-track position since January 2023, after holding the Emerging Scholar position from 2021 to 2022. She directs the Social Machines and RoboTics Lab (SMART) at NYUAD and is affiliated with the Center for AI and Robotics (CAIR). Her career includes serving as Associate Professor in Artificial Intelligence and Data Science at Emlyon Business School in Lyon, France (2019–2020); R&D Engineer in AI and Robotics at startup A.I.Mergence in Paris (2016–2017), where she developed AI algorithms for intelligent mobile robots for home surveillance; Contractual Assistant Professor (ATER) and Post-doctoral Fellow in Human-Robot Interaction at Sorbonne University (formerly University of Pierre and Marie Curie, 2014–2016); and part-time lecturing at various French institutions including ESILV, Paris VIII, Rennes I, and INSA (2011–2018). Additionally, she worked as an independent consultant in AI and Data Science for companies like Slighter and Sylog (2017–2019). Salam earned her PhD in Telecommunications, Information, and Communication Sciences and Technologies from CentraleSupélec, Rennes, France, in 2013 with highest honors, her Master’s degree in Control, Robotics, Signal, and Image Processing from Ecole Centrale de Nantes in 2011, and her Engineering degree in Telecommunications and Computer Science from Lebanese University in 2010. She is the co-founder and Head of Education and Research for Women in AI, an international non-profit Do-Tank aimed at closing the gender gap in AI through education, research, and events.

Salam’s research interests encompass human-machine interaction, human-robot interaction, artificial intelligence for mental health, bias in artificial intelligence, automatic human behavior analysis, social robotics, intelligent systems, and affective computing. Her work focuses on building socially and emotionally intelligent machines capable of natural human interaction, with applications in education and healthcare for conditions like autism, Alzheimer’s, and psychiatric disorders. Notable publications include the book chapter “Spot on SDG 5: Addressing gender (in-)equality within and with AI” (Routledge, 2022); “Automatic context-driven inference of engagement in HMI: A survey” (IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing, 2023); “A holistic AI-based approach for pharmacovigilance optimization from social media” (Artificial Intelligence in Medicine, 2022); “Fully automatic analysis of engagement and its relationship to personality in human-robot interactions” (IEEE Access, 2017); and “Facial action recognition combining heterogeneous features via multikernel learning” (IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, Part B, 2012). She has garnered awards such as winner of the ICCV 2021 DYAD challenge (Personality recognition track), Best Reviewer Award at the International Conference on Multimodal Interaction (2021), AI4EU 100,000 Horizon 2020 Grant (2019–2021), winner of the International Audio/Visual Emotion Challenge (AVEC 2012), and second place at the Facial Expression Recognition and Analysis Challenge (FERA 2011).