Newcomer: Esam Ghaleb

Dr. Esam Ghaleb is an AI researcher with a background rooted in computer science. His research is driven by his fascination with how people use verbal and nonverbal behaviors in their interactions, from expressing and perceiving emotions to building shared understanding. His research combines insights from cognitive science, psycholinguistics, and psychology to computationally model and understand the complexity of human interaction. During his Ph.D. and postdoctoral work at Maastricht University, he made methodological and technical contributions to multimodal modeling of individual behaviors, such as emotions and activities, notably extending explainable AI for emotion recognition to include gestural expressions.

Before joining the Multimodal Language Department at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, he was a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for Logic, Language & Computation, University of Amsterdam. There, he focused on modeling and understanding linguistic and gestural alignment in face-to-face dialogues and the automatic segmentation and representation of co-speech gestures. His overarching goal is to integrate verbal and nonverbal behaviors into interactive technologies that prioritize human needs, creating inclusive communication platforms that advance assistive technologies for people with diverse abilities."