Zakia Hammal is a Systems Faculty with the Robotics Institute Department in the School of Computer Science and Assistant Research Professor at the Department of Biomedical Engineering in the College of Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University. She holds a PhD in Computer Science, a MSc in AI, and an Engineer’s degree in Computer Science. Dr. Hammal’s areas of expertise are multimodal (e.g., face, head, body) human behavior modeling in social interaction, health informatics, and affective computing (also known as Emotion AI). Her research overlays the fields of computer science, machine learning, artificial intelligence, and social/behavioral psychology. Much of her recent work has addressed computational models for multimodal assessment of treatment outcomes in psychiatric disorder (e.g., depression severity), and assistive computer vision and machine learning for automatic pain intensity measurement, automatic assessment of expressiveness in children with facial abnormalities, automatic assessment of non-verbal communication in mother-infant interaction, and automatic assessment of behavioral markers (e.g., head movement dynamics) in autism spectrum disorder. Most of her research has been supported by grants from the U.S. National Institutes of Health.
Dr. Hammal is currently acting as ACM ICMI Steering Board Committee Member, Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing and IEEE Transactions on Multimedia, Guest Editor for IEEE Transactions on Multimedia Special Issue on “Pre-trained Models for Multi-modality Understanding”, and The Journal of Medical Internet Research Special Issue on “Affective Computing for Mental Wellbeing: Challenges, Opportunities, and Promising Synergies”, and acted as Research Topic Editor for Frontiers in “Multimodal Behavioural AI for Wellbeing”. She was the Lead General Chair of the ACM International Conference in Multimodal Interaction ICMI-2021, have organized successful workshops in Face and Gesture Analysis for Health Informatics (FGAHI at CVPR 2023, ICMI 2020, CVPR 2019, FG 2018), Automated Assessment of Pain (AAP at ICMI 2023, ICMI 2021, FG 2020), Interpersonal Synchrony and Influence (INTERPERSONAL at ICMI 2015), Context-Based Affect Recognition (ASOCA at ACII 2023 and CBAR at FG 2019, ACII 2017, CVPR 2016, FG 2015, ACII 2013, and SocialCom 2012), and Affective Computing for Mental Wellbeing (mWELL at ACII 2023). She also served as Area Chair for IEEE FG 2017, FG 2019, FG 2024, ACII 2019-2021-2022-2023 and ACM ICMI 2020, 2023, Publication Chair for ICMI 2014, Publicity Chair for ICMI 2019, Demo Chair for ICMI 2020, Workshop Chair for FG 2021 and ICMI 2022, and will serve as Program Chair for FG 2025. Her honors include an Outstanding Paper award at ICMI 2012, Best Paper award at ACII 2015, Outstanding Reviewer Award at FG 2015, and more recently she received the Women in AI Awards North America 2023 – AI Researcher of the Year Award.
