Esam A.H. Ghaleb was born in January 1989 in Taiz, Yemen. In 2013, he completed his Bachelor of Science in the Department of Computer Engineering at Istanbul Technical University (ITU), where he also earned his Master of Science degree in Computer Vision and Machine Learning (2015). In his Master’s thesis, he studied the aging effect on face recognition utilizing Harry Potter movies. Early academic work experiences include his position as a research assistant in the Smart Interaction, Mobile Intelligence, and Multimedia Technologies (SiMiT) Research Group at ITU for the EU project Collaborative Annotation of multi-MOdal, multI-Lingual and multi-mEdia documents (CAMOMILE), from June 2013 through February 2016. Furthermore, he conducted two internships in the Computer Vision for Human-Computer Interaction (CVHCI) laboratory at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (2014 & 2015).

In March 2016, Ghaleb started his Ph.D. in the Department of Data Science and Knowledge Engineering (DKE) at Maastricht University. He has been working in the Affective & Visual Computing Lab (AVCL), which was previously embedded in the Robots, Agents and Interaction (RAI) group. His research interests include computer vision, machine learning, Explainable AI (XAI), emotion recognition and human behavioral analysis. During the course of his Ph.D., he carried out research on bimodal emotion recognition through audio-visual cues. His work utilized facial expressions and speech signals in video clips and proposed progressive computational methodologies to capture their complementary information for emotion recognition. Ghaleb’s Ph.D. research was supported by the Horizon 2020 project Managing Affective-learning THrough Intelligent atoms and Smart InteractionS (MaTHiSiS). Besides his research and project work, he was a teaching assistant for the computer vision course in DKE at Maastricht University. Since September 2020, he has been working in the Horizon 2020 project PeRsOnalized Integrated CARE Solution for Elderly facing several short or long term conditions & enabling a better quality of LIFE (ProCare4Life). In the ProCare4Life project, his research focuses on human behavioral analysis, mainly for people with neurodegenerative diseases. His research has been published in various peer-reviewed conference proceedings and high-impact journals.