Safinah Ali

Safinah Ali is an Assistant Professor at NYU Steinhardt in the Department of Administration Leadership and Technology. Prior to her appointment she gained a PhD in Media Arts and Sciences from Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Lab. She also holds a Masters degree  in Science from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a Masters degree in Human-Computer Interaction from Carnegie Mellon University, and a Bachelor's degree in Design from Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati.

Safinah’s research is about using AI tools and agents to support human creativity and learning. She develops child-AI interactions to foster creative learning and develops inclusive AI curricula to empower creators. She has deployed her AI learning resources to teachers across the globe and engaged in extensive student outreach. She develops teaching resources, interactive tools, and assessments to make AI concepts and tools accessible to all, and study their influence on student learning. She demonstrated how students showed growth in their AI knowledge, attitudes and career interest after engaging with the curricula. She also develops social robotic agents to provide creativity scaffolding and social-emotional support to children. She personalizes these interactions to students with diverse learning needs and abilities. Through long-term research, she has demonstrated how these interventions led to heightened verbal, figural and constructional creativity for all children. Her work is published in academic journals and peer-reviewed conferences, including, Computers and Education (C&E), International Journal of Child-computer Interaction (IJCCI), Frontiers in Robotics and AI, International Journal of Artificial Intelligence in Education (IJAIED), ACM Human-Robot Interaction (HRI), Computer-human Interaction (CHI), AAAI, ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education (SIGCSE), and ACM Creativity and Cognition. Safinah was the recipient of the Teaching Excellence Award 2024, Microsoft Research fellowship (2022-2024), and MIT’s Teaching Development fellowship, where she developed programming for making classroom environments more inclusive.