Dr. Mohammad Soleymani

Associate Professor

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Biography

Mohammad Soleymani is a research associate professor with the USC Institute for Creative Technologies. He received his PhD in computer science from the University of Geneva in 2011. From 2012 to 2014, he was a Marie Curie fellow at Imperial College London. Before joining ICT, he worked as a research scientist at the Swiss Center for Affective Sciences, University of Geneva. His main research line involves machine learning, emotion recognition, and behavior understanding. He is a recipient of the Swiss National Science Foundation Ambizione grant and the EU Marie Curie fellowship. He has served on multiple conference organization committees and held editorial roles, notably as an associate editor for the IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing from 2015 to 2021, and as general chair for ICMI 2024 and technical program chair for ACM ICMI in 2018 and ACII in 2017. He was the president of the Association for the Advancement of Affective Computing (AAAC) from 2019 to 2021. His research focuses on the automatic perception and generation of human behavior and emotions through multimodal machine learning, emphasizing applications in nonverbal behavior sensing and generation for social interactions. Together with his team, he works on emotion recognition, mental health assessment, multimodal sentiment analysis, and the development of the ICT OpenSense framework for tracking facial expressions and voice activity.

Research Interests

Experience

Research Associate Professor

2014-01-01 — Present

USC Institute for Creative Technologies • Los Angeles, CA

Focuses on research related to machine learning and emotion recognition.

Research Scientist

2011-01-01 — 2014-01-01

Swiss Center for Affective Sciences, University of Geneva •

Conducted research in emotion recognition and behavior understanding.

Requirements for University of Southern California

Master Program
Requirements
GPA Requirement
Required:3
TOEFL
Listening
Required:20
Reading
Required:20
Writing
Required:20
Speaking
Required:20
Total
Required:90
IELTS
Listening
Required:6
Reading
Required:6
Writing
Required:6
Speaking
Required:6
Overall
Required:6.5
GRE General
Prerequisites
Bachelor's degree in Engineering, Math, or Hard Science
Application Checklist
  • Online application
  • Official transcripts
  • Personal Statement
  • Resume/CV
  • Letters of Recommendation (not required for MS CS, but allowed)
Specialization Notes

GRE is NOT required for Master's applicants for 2025-2026.