Her research is focused on integrating machine learning and artificial intelligence with advance technologies to improve the quality of life of people with physical and cognitive disabilities. Begum's doctoral research involved designing a bio-inspired Bayesian model of visual attention for embodied robots. She received her M.Eng from Memorial University, Canada in 2005, and her Ph.D, Electrical and Computer Engineering, from University of Waterloo, Canada, in 2010. She worked as a postdoctoral fellow in the Socially Intelligent Machine lab at GaTech (2010-2011) and in the AI & Robotics team at the Toronto Rehabilitation Institute of the University of Toronto (2012-2013.)