Samira Shaikh

Samira Shaikh is an assistant professor in the Computer Science Department in the College of Computing and Informatics at UNC Charlotte. She has a joint appointment with the Department of Psychology as an assistant professor in Cognitive Science. She is also an affiliate faculty member of the Data Science Intiative and Project Mosaic at UNC Charlotte.

Her research interests are in the areas of Data Science, Computational Sociolinguistics and Computational Social Science, Cognitive Science, Natural Language Processing and Artificial Intelligence. She has extensive experience working in these areas of research through federally-funded grants as a senior research scientist at the Research Foundation of SUNY.

She received her Ph.D. in computer science from the University at Albany -- State University of New York in 2016. For her dissertation, she created a persuasive virtual chat agent, capable of changing people's opinion in online discussions. This research on persuasion and chatbots has resulted in two active funded projects (DARPA and ARO), for which Shaikh currently serves as a principal investigator and co-principal investigator, respectively.