Rate My Professor Wafa Johal

Wafa Johal is an Associate Professor in Digital Innovation in the School of Computing and Information Systems within the Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology at the University of Melbourne. She earned her PhD in Computer Science from the University of Grenoble Alpes and a Master's degree (Research) from the same institution. Prior to her current role, she served as a researcher at the CHILI Lab and the Mobot Group at EPFL. As a leader in the Human-Computer Interaction research group, she heads the Human-Robot Interaction theme.

Her research integrates artificial intelligence and human-computer interaction to develop intuitive and effective assistive robot systems, emphasizing social signal sensing, affective and cognitive reasoning, natural expressivity, and novel interfaces for human-robot shared understanding. Core areas include human-robot collaboration and communication, robots for learning and rehabilitation, learning from demonstration, tangible robots and haptics, and social robotics. She is an ARC Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA) Fellow (2021-2024) and an ARC Future Fellow (2026-2030). In 2023, she received the Women in AI Award for AI in Education, recognizing her contributions to leveraging robotics and AI for personalized learning experiences. Notable publications encompass 'Automated human-level diagnosis of dysgraphia using a consumer tablet' (2018, NPJ Digital Medicine), 'Research trends in social robots for learning' (2020, Current Robotics Reports), '10 years of human-NAO interaction research: A scoping review' (2021, Frontiers in Robotics and AI), 'Cellulo: Versatile handheld robots for education' (2017, ACM/IEEE HRI), and '"It is not the robot who learns, it is me." Treating severe dysgraphia using child-robot interaction' (2021, Frontiers in Psychiatry). Her scholarship advances robot-assisted education, rehabilitation, and collaborative autonomy, evidenced by high-impact outputs in premier venues.