Abdallah “Abdo” El Ali is a Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) researcher with a strong background in Cognitive Science. He holds the position of a tenured research scientist at Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI), working within the Distributed & Interactive Systems (DIS) group. He leads the research area on Affective Interactive Systems (AIS). Within the AI, Media, and Democracy Lab, he leads Human-AI Interaction research focusing on AI transparency in media. In addition, he is on the executive board for CHI Nederland (CHI NL), the local Dutch SIGCHI chapter which he helped reinstate in August, 2020.
Prior to his current position, he conducted his Postdoctoral research at the HCI Oldenburg lab, which is part of the Media Informatics and Multimedia Systems group at the University of Oldenburg / OFFIS in Germany. He obtained his PhD in Computer Science from the University of Amsterdam (Netherlands), where he worked within the (former) Information and Language Processing Systems (ILPS) group.
Abdallah’s research focuses on Affective Interactive Systems where he combines advances in sensing and actuation, eXtended Reality, and Artificial Intelligence to augment human cognitive, affective, and social interactions. Within the AIMD lab, his focus is on Trustworthy Human-AI Interaction, specifically on designing and building transparent and trustworthy AI, using the EU AI Act as a point of departure.
