Prof. Poonam Goyal is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science & Information Systems, Birla Institute of Technology & Science, Pilani, Pilani Campus. She is the coordinator of APPCAIR, AI Research Center, BITS Pilani, Pilani Campus. She heads the Web Intelligence and Social Computing Laboratory (WiSOC Lab) of the department. She is also a core member of Advanced Data Analytics and Parallel Technologies Laboratory (ADAPT Lab). Prof. Poonam received her ME degree in Software Systems from BITS Pilani and Ph.D. (Mathematics) from IIT Roorkee.

She specializes in Multimodal learning, Generative AI, Natural Language Processing, Computer Vision and Big Data Analytics. Her research has contributed to various social and scientific domains like Satellite analytics, multi-modal knowledge graphs, Generative AI for design, etc. She has published several research articles in various top-tier conferences and journals such as IEEE Transactions on Multimedia, ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing Communications and Applications, IEEE Transactions on Social Computing, Expert Systems, AAAI, EACL, IEEE Cluster, IEEE Big Data, IEEE HiPC, IEEE/ACM/ASA DSAA, etc. She has also filed a few patents related to knowledge graphs, OCR, Generative AI for Mechanical Design, Efficient processing of high-resolution SITS, etc. She has served as PI/Co-PI for several sponsored research projects from Governments – Ministry of Education, Ministry of Tribal Affairs, MeitY, VESKI-SMRP, SERB, etc. and from Industry – Adobe, Mercedes-Benz, Micron, etc.

She is a recipient of 2021 Google AI for Social Good research award and 2010 IBM Research Innovation Award under the Smarter Planet Initiative in the area of Scalable Data Analytics. She has been recognized by "India AI" (a Govt. body which is an initiative of MEITY, NeGD, and NASSCOM) as one of the 8 leading women AI researchers in India on International Women's Day 2021.