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 Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing and IEEE Transactions on Multimedia. She acted as General Chair of the ACM ICMI 2021 and Research Topic Editor for Frontiers in “Multimodal Behavioural AI for Wellbeing”. Previously, she acted as PC member for numerous conferences in her field, organized successful workshops in Interpersonal Synchrony and Influence (INTERPERSONAL at ICMI 2015), 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), Context-Based Affect Recognition (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 an Area Chair at FG 2017, FG 2019, ACII 2019, 2021, 2022 and ICMI 2020, 2023, Publication Chair of ICMI 2014, Publicity Chair of ICMI 2019, Demo Chair of ICMI 2020, and Workshop Chair of FG 2021 and ICMI 2022. Her honors include an outstanding paper award at ICMI 2012, Best paper award at ACII 2015, and Outstanding Reviewer Award at FG 2015