Dr. Zakia Hammal

Biography

Zakia Hammal is an Assistant Research Professor at the Robotics Institute, School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. Her areas of expertise include multimodal human behavior modeling, social interaction, health informatics, and affective computing. Dr. Hammal's recent work has focused on computational models for multimodal assessment of treatment outcomes in psychiatric disorders, including depression severity. She has explored the use of assistive computer vision and machine learning for automatic pain intensity measurement, and she has conducted assessments of expressiveness in children with facial abnormalities, as well as non-verbal communication in mother-infant interactions. Her research has received support from the U.S. National Institutes of Health. Dr. Hammal serves on the ACM ICMI Steering Board Committee and is an Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing. She has held various editorial roles, organized workshops, and served as a Program Chair for multiple conferences. Her contributions have been recognized with awards, such as the Outstanding Paper Award at ICMI 2012 and the Women AI Awards North America 2023 – AI Researcher of the Year Award. Her research intersects computer science, machine learning, artificial intelligence, and social/behavioral psychology.

Research Interests