Social Machines and RoboTics Lab

Hanan Salam, PI

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Hanan Salam is an AI and robotics expert, an academic, and an entrepreneur. She is the co-founder of Women in AI, an international non-profit Do-Tank whose mission is to close the gender gap in the field of Artificial Intelligence through education, research, and events. She is currently an assistant professor in Computer Science and the director of the Social Machines and Robotics (SMART) Lab at New York University Abu Dhabi. The SMART lab focuses on the development of smart machines endowed with social and emotional intelligence, and their applications in education and well-being. She is a public speaker and an advisor on AI. She has participated as a keynote speaker and panelist in major events and organisations such as UNESCO and OECD world forum. Prior to this, Hanan was an associate professor in AI at Emlyon Business School in France. She has taught in different higher education French universities, worked in the robotics industry, and as a consultant in AI for several companies. Hanan holds a PhD, an Msc and an engineering degree in Telecommunications, Information, and Communication Sciences and Technologies. She is an advocate of technology for common good and an activist for women empowerment.

Maha El Garf, Postdoctoral Researcher

Maha Elgarf holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science and Robotics from the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Sweden. Prior to that, for five years she worked as a lecturer assistant at the German University in Cairo (GUC) teaching a variety of courses including introduction to computer science, data structures and algorithms and computer vision, as well as co-supervising bachelor’s and master’s thesis projects. She previously earned both her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Digital Media Engineering and Technology from the same university in Egypt and finished her master’s thesis project at the University of Augsburg in Germany.In her Ph.D., she investigated behavioral generation methods for robots to stimulate children’s creativity through child-robot interactions. Her current research interests include social robotics, human-robot interaction, affective computing,  deep learning, conversational AI and educational human-computer interaction. 

Munachiso Nwadike, Research Assistant

Munachiso is a passionate researcher, working in the field of affective computing under Dr. Hanan Salam at the NYUAD SMaRT Lab. He holds a bachelors degree in computer science from NYU, and masters degree in machine learning from the Mohamed Bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence. Munachiso is currently interested in techniques for the personalisation of affective computing models to the unique tendencies and traits of human individuals. This work lies at the intersection of multimodal analysis, vision, and NLP. His masters thesis focused on automatic hyperparameter tuning using novel bayesian optimisation algorithms implemented with scalable MLOps infrastructure.

Jialin Li, Research Assistant

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Jialin Li is a junior majoring in Data Science and minoring in Psychology at New York University Shanghai. She works on Engagement Detection in Online Learning Project with Prof. Hanan Salam as a student research assistant. Jialin has special interests in exploring how psychology features can be applied to better facilitating deep learning models. She enjoys working on optimizing prediction and generalizing the models to the relevant applications fields.