Cecilia O. Alm is a Professor in the Department of Psychology within the College of Liberal Arts at Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT), where she serves as the Artificial Intelligence Program Director. She holds multiple leadership roles including Director of the Center for Human-aware AI and Director of the Computational Linguistics and Speech Processing Lab (CLaSP). Her institutional affiliations span the School of Information, Ph.D. Programs in Cognitive Science and Computing and Information Sciences, Department of Computer Science, and MS in Data Science program. Dr. Alm earned her Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her research focuses on human-centered artificial intelligence with particular emphasis on linguistic and multimodal sensing, affective computing, and natural language processing. She investigates how AI systems can better understand and respond to human communication through multimodal dialogue processing, with applications in accessibility, education, and healthcare. Her recent publications demonstrate a strong trend toward developing inclusive AI systems, particularly through projects addressing Deaf community needs (MULTICOLLAB-ASL), subtle emotion recognition (FUSE corpus), and bias mitigation in NLP. The work consistently integrates multimodal data streams (speech, gaze, gesture) to create more responsive human-AI interaction frameworks. Current research directions emphasize diversity in AI education, visual prosody in sign languages, and human-in-the-loop AI development. Dr. Alm leads several significant NSF-funded initiatives including the AWARE-AI program, IRES AI-PROWIL international research experience, and collaborative projects with Gallaudet University focused on Deaf scientist-centered AI research. She has secured over $2.5 million in external funding for her work on human-aware AI systems. She directs the CLaSP lab which provides research opportunities for PhD, MS, and undergraduate students, with graduates employed at major technology companies including Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, and Facebook. The lab focuses on real-world AI applications in accessibility, human-robot interaction, and multimodal communication systems.










