Attar, Nada
Preferred: nada.attar@sjsu.edu
Office hours: Monday 12:30 PM - 1:30 PM in person | Wednesday 1:00 PM - 2:00 PM via Zoom
Associate Professor, Computer Science
Graduate Coordinator for MS Computer Science
Member, University Academic Senate
Education
- Post Doctoral Research Fellow, 2017, Harvard University, Mass. Eye & Ear Institute, Schepens Eye Research Institute, Bowers Lab, Boston, MA
- Ph.D., 2016, University of Massachusetts, Boston, MA, Computer Science.
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Fellow, 2010-2013, Harvard College Observatory, Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Laboratory of Visual Learning, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics
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M.S., 2009, Tufts University, Medford, MA, Computer Science.
- BSc., 2005 King Abdulaziz University, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, Computer Science
Bio
Dr. Nada Attar’s research focuses on Computer Vision, Ethics in AI, Human-AI Interaction,
and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). For four years, she served as the lead instructor
for the Google Computer Science Summer Institute (CSSI) at SJSU, helping historically underrepresented students succeed and thrive in STEM
and computer science. She was awarded the Mozilla Foundation’s Responsible Computing Challenge, a competitive grant given to only 15 teams across the United States. Along with
the Mozilla team, she helped launch the Next Generation AI Developers Hackathon at
SJSU, promoting responsible computing and advancing AI development. Dr. Attar is involved
in the CIRCLE project, which fosters responsible computing through interdisciplinary learning.
Her research explores ethical considerations in large language models (LLMs). She
also focuses on privacy in visual datasets and ethical AI models to investigate biases
in datasets, algorithms, and user behavior. Her work also includes eye-tracking applications
in automated vehicles and cognitive state measurement. Dr. Attar’s work also extends
to computer vision applications for climate change and coastal resilience, including
preprocessing, object detection, and contour detection.
Dr. Attar’s graduates have gone on to build successful careers at leading organizations such as Google, Meta, Amazon Web Services, Tesla, PayPal, and the City of San José, among many others. The complete list of Alumni can be found here
Dr. Attar completed her Postdoctoral Research at Harvard University (Mass. Eye & Ear Institute, Schepens Eye Research Institute, Bowers Lab). She earned her Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Massachusetts Boston, an M.S. in Computer Science from Tufts University, and a B.Sc. in Computer Science from King Abdulaziz University. She was also a Fellow during her Ph.D. at the Harvard College Observatory, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.