Biography

I am an assistant professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of California, Irvine. I received my Ph.D. from the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at the University of California, Los Angeles, in 2018 under the supervision of Prof. Mani Srivastava.

Before joining UCI in Fall of 2019, I worked at Janelia Research Campus, Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI), in the Scientific Computing Department (Computational Methods Group).

I am leading the UCI Pervasive Autonomy Group. My group research goal is to weave personalization and context awareness into the very fabric of autonomous pervasive systems. Specifically, I focus on how to design machine-learning-based systems to build adaptation and personalization services, design OS system support technologies for pervasive autonomous computing, and address privacy concerns arising from personalized services. My work spans the areas of embedded systems, mobile computing, IoT, and machine learning.

Salma Elmalaki
Assistant Professor
Office: EH 3428
Pervasive Autonomy Lab: EH 4111
949-824-8066
salma dot elmalaki at uci dot edu

Key Research Area

Cyber-Human-Physical Systems, Pervasive autonomous IoT, Machine Learning, and Designing personalized context-aware systems with a particular focus on performance, privacy, reliability, fairness, and adaptability. My research draws on tools from embedded systems, human modeling, machine learning, and mobile computing.

Awards

The NSF CAREER Award. 2024-2028
Elmalaki’s research entitled, “Psychology-aware Human-in-the-Loop Cyber-Physical-System (HCPS): Methodologies, Algorithms, and Deployment” is awarded the NSF CAREER award.

The Mexico Graduate Research & Education Program award for project title, “Data Analysis and Human Activity Modelling for Electricity and Solar Photovoltaic Electricity Generation”- 2023

Early Career Teaching Excellence Award – 2023
UCI Samueli School of Engineering (SSoE)

Professor of the Year Award – 2023
From the Engineering Student Council (esc) for EECS Department

The UCI Dr. De. Gallow Professor of the Year Award – Honorable Mention 2022

NSF CRII Award. 2021-2023
Elmalaki’s research entitled, “Society-in-the-Loop Personalized Computing” was awarded the NSF CISE CRII award beginning June 15, 2021

Gold Medal Award from the ACM SIGBED Student Research Competition (SRC’21) as an advisor, 2021

Academic Senate Council on Research, Computing, and Libraries (CORCL) Award, 2020, 2021, 2022

HSSoE Research, UCI MERI Seed Fund Award, Collaborative, 2020
Multidisciplinary Engineering Research Initiative, SSoE, UCI

Microsoft Research Ph.D. Fellowship
, 2016-2018

Grace Hopper Celebration (GHC) Scholarship, 2018

Nominated, Outstanding Teaching Assistant award, 2016
Electrical Engineering Department, UCLA

Honorable Mention Award, 2016
Microsoft Research Student Summit on Mobility, Systems, and Networking

Best Paper Award, MobiCom – 2015
International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking (MobiCom’15)

Best Community Paper Award, MobiCom – 2015
International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking (MobiCom’15)

Education

Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering 
University of California, Los Angeles, 2018
Dissertation: System Software Mechanism for Pervasive and Autonomous Computing.
M.S. in Electrical Engineering
University of California, Los Angeles, 2014
Thesis: Context-Aware Runtime Adaptation for Android OS.
B.Sc. in Computer and Systems Engineering
Ain Shams University, Cairo, Egypt, 2008

Funding