Somaya Ben Allouch
Professor Digital Life
Dr. Somaya Ben Allouch leads the Digital Life research group, part of the Centre for Applied Research of Digital Media & Creative Industries (FDMCI). Within Digital Life, she conducts practice-based research on the design, use, and evaluation of digital technology in the application domain of health and wellbeing from a human-centred perspective.
Expertises
Human-Computer Interaction | Social Robotics| Data-driven systems | Artificial Intelligence in Health & Wellbeing
Contact
- E-mail: s.ben.allouch@hva.nl
- LinkedIn: follow Somaya op LinkedIn
About Somaya Ben Allouch
Somaya focuses on Human-Machine Interaction, technology acceptance, and long-term use, with a particular interest in Social Robotics, Data-Driven Systems, and AI. She obtained her PhD in 2008 from the University of Twente for her research on ambient intelligent technologies, where she worked from 2002 to 2014. In 2011 and 2012, she was a researcher at the Ambient Intelligence Research Lab at Stanford University.
Somaya is a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Ambient Intelligence and Smart Environments and guest editor for journals including the Journal of Social Robotics and the Journal of Distributed Sensor Networks. She is involved in various (inter)nationally funded research projects and supervises several PhD students. Since 2023, she has been elected as a founding fellow of the Netherlands Academy of Engineering (NAE) and serves as Programme Chair Europe for the IEEE RO-MAN Conference 2025.
Additional roles
- Founding fellow Netherlands Academy of engineering (NAE)
- Vice Chair of the Kalymero Foundation (robotics for youth)
- FEMTECH leadership