Welcoming the New Awards and Scholarship Chairs: Dr Marjana Prifti Skënduli and Dr Ghita Amor-Tijani
We have welcomed our new Awards and Scholarships chairs to ACM-W this month.
Dr Marjana Prifti Skënduli has become the Chair of the Awards Committee for ACM-W Global. She previously served as the Chair of the ACM-W Scholarships Committee. Marjana Prifti Skënduli received her PhD in Computer Science from the University of New York Tirana and is currently a Postdoctoral Researcher in Quantum Machine Learning at the Università degli Studi di Bari Aldo Moro, Italy. She holds the position of Assistant Professor and Director of Graduate Programs at the University of New York Tirana (currently on sabbatical leave). Dr Skënduli is a member of the Council of Europe Expert Group on Artificial Intelligence and Education, and serves as a Red Team Network Member and Policy Researcher at OpenAI. Her research spans Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and Quantum Machine Learning, alongside a strong interest in AI applications in Education. In 2023, she founded AI Albania, the country’s first centre of AI excellence, dedicated to responsible AI and building a sustainable ecosystem through education, collaboration, and research.
Dr Ghita Amor-Tijani will serve as our new Chair of the ACM-W Scholarships Committee. She is an associate teaching professor and assistant director of teaching faculty in Boston at the Khoury College of Computer Sciences at Northeastern University. She earned her doctorate and master’s in computer science from George Washington University. Before joining Northeastern, Dr Amor-Tijani taught several computer science courses at Wentworth Institute of Technology and the University of Rhode Island. Her research interests include exploring various methods to enhance information retrieval systems. In her research, she analyses the different approaches taken to solve problems with word-by-word translation using online dictionaries. Additionally, she works on designing and implementing techniques to improve the efficiency of an Arabic-English CLIR system.