Israa Tartoussi is a PhD student at the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU), supervised by Dr. Pendar Alirezazadeh and Dr. Fadi Dornaika, and is expected to defend by the end of 2026. Her research focuses on Deep Learning Image-Based Plant Disease Classification, with an emphasis on lightweight architectures and spatial attention mechanisms for PlantVillage agricultural datasets under occlusion scenarios.

She holds a Master 2 in Computer Science and a Bachelor’s degree in Information Technology from the Lebanese University. In addition to her research, Israa is an experienced programming instructor in Python, Java, PHP, mobile/web development, and database systems. She has taught at Jinan University and conducted training in Python and Django.

Her recent work integrates attention modules such as CBAM, BAM, and SAM into models like MobileNetV2 and EfficientNet to enhance classification performance. She evaluates these models using metrics like F1-score, Grad-CAM, and t-SNE to interpret and visualize the learned features.

Beyond academia, Israa is passionate about educational innovation, semantic technologies, and applied AI in agriculture.