Baraa Hikal - Zuse School ELIZA

Master’s Student

Baraa Hikal is an M.Sc. student in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning at TU Darmstadt, an ELIZA scholarship holder, and a recipient of the Niedersachsenstipendium. He is currently a research assistant at the UKP Lab, working with Prof. Iryna Gurevych and Jonathan Tonglet on multimodal chronolocation, automated fact-checking, and planning agents that combine visual reasoning with external evidence retrieval. Previously, he worked at GippLab on dimensional sentiment analysis and deepfake analysis, and at Qatar University on IRAC-based legal summarization. His research focuses on trustworthy and agentic AI, multimodal reasoning, hallucination detection, and factuality evaluation. His bachelor’s thesis focused on hallucination detection in language models. He has achieved first-place results in shared tasks affiliated with ACL and EMNLP, including SemEval 2025, SemEval 2026, BEA 2025, and ArabicNLP 2025, and received the Best Paper Award at BEA 2025.

Baraa Hikal is an M.Sc. student in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning at TU Darmstadt, an ELIZA scholarship holder, and a recipient of the Niedersachsenstipendium. He is currently a research assistant at the UKP Lab, working with Prof. Iryna Gurevych and Jonathan Tonglet on multimodal chronolocation, automated fact-checking, and planning agents that combine visual reasoning with external evidence retrieval. Previously, he worked at GippLab on dimensional sentiment analysis and deepfake analysis, and at Qatar University on IRAC-based legal summarization. His research focuses on trustworthy and agentic AI, multimodal reasoning, hallucination detection, and factuality evaluation. His bachelor’s thesis focused on hallucination detection in language models. He has achieved first-place results in shared tasks affiliated with ACL and EMNLP, including SemEval 2025, SemEval 2026, BEA 2025, and ArabicNLP 2025, and received the Best Paper Award at BEA 2025.

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