Albert Ali Salah appointed as Professor of Social and Affective Computing
As of 1 April, Albert Ali Salah is appointed as Professor of Social and Affective Computing at the Department of Information and Computing Sciences. Salah’s research focuses on the development of computational systems that can interpret and model social and affective signals, and thus exhibit and understand human behaviour.
Salah’s research comprises technologies that enable systems to analyze and use the rich social and affective signals emitted by humans and other intelligent systems. This involves the perception, representation, and modeling of social and affective signals in their proper context.
Example applications include smart healthcare systems that monitor patients for physical and cognitive wellbeing, robots that interact with children in educational scenarios, multimedia retrieval systems that model affective states of the users and evaluate emotional valence of content. Salah was also the scientific coordinator of the Data for Refugees (D4R) Challenge, a mobile data challenge to improve the living conditions of refugees.
Interdisciplinary
The creation of a Chair on Social and Affective Computing increases the links between Information and Computing Sciences and Behavioral Sciences. This area is highly interdisciplinary, and will provide core competences for building socially skilled, interactive intelligent systems. On the social computing side, larger behavioral patterns are analyzed, which links it to Data Science. On the affective computing side, individual and dyadic behavioral patterns are modeled, which provides collaboration opportunities with the Faculty of Medicine, as well as behaviour-related research units, such as the Child Experience Center.
Albert Ali Salah
Prof. Salah received his Master’s and PhD degree at Boğaziçi University in Turkey. After his PhD, he spent several years as a researcher at CWI and the University of Amsterdam, before returning again to Boğaziçi University to grow to an associate professor position. After a one year sabbatical at Nagoya University in Japan, Salah has now returned to the Netherlands to fulfill his current position as Professor of Social and Affective Computing.