Sharifa Alghowinem

Sharifa Alghowinem is a Research Scientist in the Personal Robots Group, where she builds emotionally intelligent robots and AI agents that sense how a person feels, reason about it, and interact in ways that keep trust calibrated, so people rely on the agent appropriately. A companion notices a child is struggling and asks what is wrong; a facilitator helps older adults turn strangers into friends. In each case the interaction is designed to strengthen competence, self-efficacy and relatedness, so that people flourish beyond the interaction, after the agent is gone.

She started on the sensing side of emotional intelligence. Her PhD at the Australian National University (2015) showed that clinical depression leaves traces in how people speak, where they look and how they move their head, and that a machine can read them. That line of multimodal mental-health sensing continues today, with an emphasis on models that can show a clinician why. At MIT since 2019, first as an Ibn Khaldun Fellow, she moved from reading emotion to acting on it, using the Jibo social robot and large language and vision-language models to study how an agent builds a relationship over time, keeps trust calibrated, makes learning playful, and hands over rather than holds on.

Almost all the evidence in affective computing and human–robot interaction comes from Western, English-speaking, one-to-one settings. Her projects deliberately start elsewhere: Arabic-speaking and refugee children, bilingual families, small groups in Saudi classrooms, immigrant-origin teens, autistic children, and older adults in residential care. She is also an Assistant Professor and Associate Director of Postgraduate Programs at Prince Sultan University in Riyadh, serves on the editorial board of IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing, and founded a visiting-researcher pipeline that has brought thirteen Saudi women from PSU to the Media Lab since 2023.