Alaa Halawani received the B.Sc. degree in computer systems engineering from Palestine Polytechnic University, Hebron, Palestine, in 1996, the M.Sc. degree in electrical engineering (computer major) from the Jordan University of Science and Technology, Irbid, Jordan, in 2000, and the Ph.D. (Dr.-Ing.) degree from the Chair of Pattern Recognition and Image Processing, University of Freiburg, Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany, in 2006. From 2000 to 2001, he was a lecturer at the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, Palestine Polytechnic University, where he rejoined as an assistant professor in 2006. In 2009, he started a two-year Postdoctoral Fellowship with the Department of Applied Physics and Electronics, Umeå University, Umeå, Sweden. He continued at the same department as an assistant professor until 2016. From 2017 to 2018, he worked as an Algorithm Development Engineer at Fingerprint Cards AB, Gothenburg, Sweden. He returned to Palestine in August 2018 and rejoined Palestine Polytechnic University as assistant professor at the department of computer engineering.
His current research interests include artificial intelligence, content-based image retrieval, biometrics, feature extraction, and object detection and recognition.,Dr. Halawani was a recipient of the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) Scholarship in 1997 and the Second DAAD Scholarship for his Ph.D. studies from the University of Freiburg, Germany, in 2001.