Aiim Lab Director
Ali Etemad, PhD, PEng, SMIEEE
Associate Professor
Mitchell Professor in AI for Human Sensing & Understanding
Queen's University, Canada
Visiting Faculty Researcher, Google
Visiting Fellow, University of Cambridge
Biography (click here)
Dr. Etemad is an Associate Professor, as well as a Mitchell Professor in AI for Human Sensing & Understanding at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Queen’s University, Canada, where he leads the Ambient Intelligence and Interactive Machines (Aiim) lab. He is also a faculty member at Ingenuity Labs Research Institute. He received his M.A.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada, in 2009 and 2014, respectively. His main areas of research are machine learning and deep learning focused on human-centered applications with wearables, smart devices, and smart environments. Prior to joining Queen’s, he held several industrial positions as lead scientist.
His work has appeared in top-tier venues such as NeurIPS, CVPR, AAAI, ICCV, ECCV, ACM CHI, ICASSP, Interspeech, ICPR, FG, T-PAMI, T-AFFC, T-IP, T-AI, T-ASLP, T-IFS, T-BIOM, T-HMS, T-NSRE, T-GRS, IEEE IoT J., and others. He is a co-inventor of 10 patents and has given over 20 invited talks at different venues.
Dr. Etemad is an Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing and IEEE Transactions on Artificial Intelligence, and has been a PC member/reviewer for NeurIPS, ICML, CVPR, AAAI, ICLR, ICCV, ACII (senior PC), ICASSP, ISWC, ICMI, VRST, BSN, Interspeech, CHI, SMC, AIVR, SAP (senior PC), among others. He is also an active reviewer for journals such as T-AFFC, T-ASLP, T-NNLS, T-AI, T-HMS, T-KDD, T-NSRE, JBHI, Patt. Rec., Neural. Comput. Appl., CVIU, Appl. Intell., and many others. Dr. Etemad has been the Industry Relations Chair for Canadian Conference on AI (2019), Publicity Co-Chair for European Workshop on Visual Information Processing (2022), and General Chair for the AAAI Workshop on Human-Centric Self-Supervised Learning (2022).
He has received a number of awards including Supervisor of the Year Award (at Queen’s), Instructor of the Year Award (at Queen’s), and several Best Paper Awards (e.g., at ACM ICMI'23).
Dr. Etemad’s lab and research program have been funded by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) of Canada, Ontario Centers of Excellence (OCE), Canadian Foundation for Innovation (CFI), Mitacs, and other organizations, as well as the private sector.
Activities
Conference Organization and Chairing:
Chair, Session on Speech and Acoustic Signal Processing II, IEEE International Joint Conference on Neural Networks (IJCNN), 2022
General Chair, AAAI Workshop on Human-Centric Self-Supervised Learning (HC- SSL), 2022
Publicity Co-Chair, European Workshop on Visual Information Processing (EUVIP), 2022
Chair, Session on Physiological Data Modeling, IEEE International Conference of Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction (ACII), 2021
Co-chair, Session on Speech and Language Analysis, IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP), Barcelona, Spain, 2020
Chair of Industry Relations, Canadian Conference on AI + Graphics Interface + Computer and Robot Vision (AI/GI/CRV), Kingston, Canada, 2019
Co-chair, Session on Entertainment Applications, IEEE Conference on Virtual Environments, Human-Computer Interfaces and Measurement Systems, 2011
Journal Editorship:
Associate Editor, IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing, 2023-present
Associate Editor, IEEE Transactions on Artificial Intelligence, 2022-present
Guest Co-Editor, Special Issue on Sensors for Biological Signal Analysis, J. Sensors, 2020-2021
Conference Program/Review Committee:
Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2023, 2022, 2021
International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) , 2023, 2022
IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2024, 2023, 2022
IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2023
AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), 2024, 2023
International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2024, 2023, 2022
European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2022
[Senior PC] IEEE International Conference of Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction (ACII), 2023, 2022, 2021
ACM International Symposium on Wearable Computers (ISWC), 2023, 2021
IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP), 2022, 2021, 2020
Canadian Conference on Artificial Intelligence (CanAI), 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019
ACM Symposium on Virtual Reality Software and Technology (VRST), 2021
23rd ACM International Conference on Multimodal Interaction (ICMI), 2021
Interspeech, 2021
IEEE Artificial Intelligence and Virtual Reality (AIVR), 2021, 2020, 2018
ACM Symposium on Applied Perception (SAP), 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016
IEEE Body Sensor Networks (BSN), 2021, 2019, 2018
IEEE Conference on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics (SMC), 2020, 2019
IEEE International Conf. on Ubiquitous Intelligence and Computing (UIC), 2018
ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 2018
23rd ACM Symposium on Virtual Reality Software and Technology (VRST), 2017
ACM CHI Play, 2017
ACM Conference on Automotive User Interfaces and Interactive Vehicular Applications (AutomotiveUI), 2017
Journal Review:
IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence
IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems
IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing
IEEE Transactions on Human-Machine Systems
IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing
IEEE Transactions on Artificial Intelligence
IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering
IEEE Transactions on Neural Systems & Rehabilitation Engineering
IEEE Journal of Biomedical and Health Informatics
IEEE-EMBS Journal of Translational Engineering in Health and Medicine
Scientific Reports (Nature)
Pattern Recognition (Elsevier)
Applied Soft Computing (Elsevier)
Multimedia Tools and Applications (Springer)
Neural Computation and Applications (Springer)
Applied Intelligence (Springer)
Pattern Recognition Letters (Elsevier)
Computer Vision and Image Understanding (Elsevier)
Expert Systems With Applications (Elsevier)
Grant Review:
NSERC New Frontiers Research Fund
NSERC CRD
NSERC Discovery
NSERC Idea to Innovation
MITACS Accelerate
MITACS Elevate
CFI JELF