[3] Following this, Essa attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he received his magister scientiae (Master of Science) in 1990 and his Ph.D. in 1995 at the MIT Media Lab.

His doctoral research focused on the implementation of a system to detect emotions from changes in your facial expression, which was later featured in the New York Times.

After departing MIT, Essa accepted a position as an assistant professor in the College of Computing at Georgia Tech.

[6] He is affiliated with the GVU Center and RIM@GT, and is one of the faculty members of the Computational Perception Laboratory at Georgia Tech.

[7] He is credited, alongside his doctoral student Nick Diakopoulos, with coining the term computational journalism back in 2006, when they taught the first class on the subject.