Abdallah El Ali

Hi! My name is Abdallah (or Abdo for short). I am a Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) researcher with a background in Cognitive Science. I am a (tenured) research scientist at Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI), within the Distributed & Interactive Systems (DIS) group. I am also on the executive board (adjunct treasurer) for CHI Nederland (CHI NL), where I handle events, web, and social comms.

I lead research efforts within the area of Affective Interactive Systems (AIS). Previously, I did my Postdoc at the HCI Oldenburg lab, part of the Media Informatics and Multimedia Systems group at the University of Oldenburg / OFFIS (Germany). I received my PhD in Computer Science from the University of Amsterdam (Netherlands), working at the (former) Information and Language Processing Systems (ILPS) group.

My research combines advances in Human-Computer Interaction, eXtended Reality, and Artificial Intelligence to measure, infer, and augment human cognitive, affective, and social interactions. Focus areas:

  • Data Acquisition: Systems for acquiring affective and behavioral data and labels across real and virtual environments
  • Machine Intelligence: Systems that can sense, recognize, and react to our affective and behavioral states
  • Augmentation: Systems that can enhance or modify our physical / virtual bodies and sensory perception across human-machine and human-human interactions

M.Sc. student at a Dutch university interested in HCI, AI, and/or IxD? Contact me.


NEWS

   - Giving a research talk on Affective Augmentation Systems at Digital Interactions Lab at UvA
   - Giving guest lectue on "Human-Machine Interaction" for the Biomimicry course at UvA
   - 3rd MEEC WS at ACII 2022 was a great workshop!
   - Co-director of the CHI 2023 Adjunct HCI Summer School program - website soon!
   - Will serve as Social Comms Co-chair for CHI 2023
   - Paper accepted on inferring affective responses from in-video pedestrian crossing at AutomotiveUI 2022
   - Paper accepted on real-time, continuous QoE annotation for 360 videos at QoMEX 2022
   - Short paper accepted on ethical VUIs and news delivery at CUI 2022
   - Dutch Post-CHI 2022 is on! June 22 at CWI, join us!
   - Will serve as AC for CHI 2023 (UX & Usability)
   - Will serve on PC for ICMI 2022
   - Will serve as AC for AutomotiveUI 2022
   - Paper accepted on SocialVR and video watching at Springer Virtual Reality
   - Paper accepted on few-shot learning for fine-grained physio emotion recognition at IEEE TMM
   - Paper accepted on weakly-supervised learning for fine-grained physio emotion recognition at IEEE TAFFC
   - Paper on emotion and in-vehicle empathic interfaces (cond.) accepted to CHI 2022 LBW
   - Paper on Social VR Avatar Biosignals (cond.) accepted to CHI 2022
   - Will serve as Special Session Chair for ACM MMSys 2022
   - CHI Nederland (CHI NL) website launched! https://chinederland.nl/
   - Dataset paper on physio emotion recognition in 360 VR accepted at IEEE TMM