Dr. Sallam ABUALHAIJA

Sallam Abualhaija is a Research Scientist at the Interdisciplinary Centre for Security, Reliability and Trust (SnT), University of Luxembourg contributing to the Software Verification and Validation (SVV) research group.

She currently serves on the coordination team of the FutureFinTech initiative and holds additional academic service roles, including Executive Guest Editor for a special issue on regulatory compliance in software engineering in the Information and Software Technology (IST) journal.

Her research lies at the intersection of software engineering and artificial intelligence (AI), with a strong emphasis on requirements engineering and legal and regulatory compliance.

Her research centres around two main pillars, namely the regulatory compliance of (AI-enabled) software systems and the early quality assurance of software requirements, with a vision focused on contributing to the development of trustworthy and responsible software systems.

She regularly serves on programme and organising committees for leading conferences such as RE, REFSQ, ICSE, ASE, and ACL, and acts as a reviewer for top-tier journals including TSE and TOSEM.

She has supervised or co-supervised four PhD students, with a new doctoral candidate joining soon.

She is currently the course coordinator for Introduction to AI for Space in the Master in Space Technologies and Business (MSTB) program. She also serves as the co-instructor for Software Engineering 2 in the Bachelor in Computer Science (BiCS) program.

She has conducted the majority of her research in close collaboration with industry partners and actively promotes open science. As the FOSS liaison in the SVV group, she ensures the responsible licensing and dissemination of research artefacts.

Her outreach contributions to society include: FNR AI & Society Series: “Improving the Ethical Capabilities of Software Using AI” (2024), FNRLux Campaign: Women & Girls in Science (2023), Science.lu: “ChatGPT – Hype oder Revolution in der KI?” (2023).

She received the Best Research Paper Award at the 27th IEEE International Requirements Engineering Conference (RE2019) for her article “A Machine Learning-Based Approach for Demarcating Requirements in Textual Specifications”.

She received the Best Paper Award at the 30th IEEE International Requirements Engineering Conference (RE2022) for her article “Automated Question Answering for Improved Understanding of Compliance Requirements”.

She has also received the Distinguished Reviewer Award (Research Track) at the 32nd IEEE International Requirements Engineering Conference (RE2024).

Additionally, she had a DAAD Scholarship for PhD studies (Hamburg University of Technology) and ITIS Master Program Scholarship (Leibniz University of Hanover).

Abualhaija joined the University of Luxembourg in November 2017, initially as Research Associate, and was promoted to Research Scientist in October 2021.

Between 2016 and 2017, she worked as a Postdoctoral Researcher at the L3S Research Center, Leibniz University of Hanover, Germany.

From 2013 to 2014, she worked as a Localization Specialist at Goodgame Studios in Hamburg, Germany.

In Jordan, she worked in the education sector, serving as a Teacher with the Ministry of Education from 2007 and 2010, and earlier as a Teaching Assistant at Irbid National University.

Abualhaija holds BSc and MSc in Computer Science (ranked 1st in both) from Yarmouk University, Jordan.

She earned her PhD in Computer Science in 2016 from Hamburg University of Technology, Germany. Her dissertation, titled “D-Bees: A Novel Global Algorithm for Solving Word Sense Disambiguation”, was supervised by Prof Dr. Dr. habil. Karl-Heinz Zimmermann.