Bio
Altarawneh is as an assistant professor at Lassonde School of Engineering where she integrates a passion for teaching with research at the intersection of machine learning and machine emotional intelligence. Her work employs advanced techniques, including graph neural networks and large language models, to develop emotion-aware AI agents, which are evaluated through Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) methodologies. Her interdisciplinary research spans psychology, engineering, and AI, and includes the creation of a social security robot with emotion-aware de-escalation capabilities.
Prior to joining Lassonde, Altarawneh conducted postdoctoral research at the CERC in Health Equity and Community Wellbeing at Toronto Metropolitan University, focusing on technology-facilitated violence detection in interdisciplinary contexts. She has extensive teaching experience, having instructed courses such as Discrete Mathematics, Programming, Web Development, Ethics in the Information Age, Theory of Computation, Machine Learning, and Data Mining at universities and colleges in Canada and internationally.
