Hanan Salam

Hanan Salam is Assistant Professor in Computer Science at New York University Abu Dhabi. She is also the director of Social Machines & Robotics Lab (SMART) & affiliated with the Center of AI & Robotics (CAIR). 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.

Hanan holds a PhD in Telecommunications, Information, and Communication Sciences and Technologies from CentraleSupélec in France, an engineering degree in Computer Science and Telecommunications from the Lebanese University, and a Masters degree in Control, Robotics, Signal and Image Processing from Ecole Centrale de Nantes, France.

After spending three years as a researcher and lecturer at the University of Pierre and Marie Curie (Sorbonne), she worked in the robotics industry where she was an R&D Engineer in AI and Robotics at A.I.Mergence, a startup specialized in intelligent autonomous robots for home security. Following, she worked as an independent consultant in AI and Data Science, in parallel with part-time lecturing at different French universities and engineering schools. She then joined Emlyon Business School as an associate professor in AI before joining NYUAD.

Her scientific interests include Artificial Intelligence for mental healthcare, Human-Machine Interaction (HMI), social robotics, computer vision, personalized machine learning, and affective computing. She has published several international peer-reviewed conference and journal papers on social robotics and intelligent affective computing. She is an advocate of technology for common good and an activist for women empowerment.