Biography

Björn W. Schuller received his diploma in 1999, his doctoral degree for his study on Automatic Speech and Emotion Recognition in 2006, and his habilitation (fakultas docendi) and was entitled Adjunct Teaching Professor (venia legendi) in the subject area of Signal Processing and Machine Intelligence for his work on Intelligent Audio Analysis in 2012 all in electrical engineering and information technology from TUM in Munich/Germany.

At present, he is Full Professor and head of the Chair of Complex and Intelligent Systems at the University of Passau/Germany where he previously headed the Chair of Sensor Systems in 2013. At the same time he is a Reader (Associate Professor) in Machine Learning in the Department of Computing at Imperial College London/UK since 2015, being a Senior Lecturer since 2013. Further, he is the co-founding CEO of audEERING GmbH – a TUM start-up on intelligent audio engineering. Previously, he headed the Machine Intelligence and Signal Processing Group at TUM from 2006 to 2014. In 2013 he was also invited as a permanent Visiting Professor in the School of Computer Science and Technology at the Harbin Institute of Technology, Harbin/P.R. China and a Visiting Professor at the Université de Genève in Geneva/Switzerland and remains an appointed associate of the institute. In 2016 he was further invited as Professor of the Vilnius Gediminas Technical University in Vilnius/Lithuania. In 2012 he was with Joanneum Research, Institute for Information and Communication Technologies in Graz/Austria, remaining an expert consultant of the institute until 2016. In 2011 he was guest lecturer at the Università Politecnica delle Marche (UNIVPM) in Ancona/Italy and visiting researcher in the Machine Learning Research Group of NICTA in Sydney/Australia. From 2009 to 2010 he lived in Paris/France and was with the CNRS-LIMSI Spoken Language Processing Group in Orsay/France, and was a visiting scientist at Imperial College. Best known are his works advancing Machine Learning for the Engineering of Intelligent Audio and Multisensorial Complex Information Systems, Affective Computing, mHealth, Human-Computer/Robot Interaction, and Multimedia Retrieval.

Dr. Schuller is an elected member of the IEEE Speech and Language Processing Technical Committee, Senior Member of the IEEE, and member of the ACM and ISCA. Before, he was President of the Association for the Advancement of Affective Computing (AAAC, 2013-2015), and Honorary Fellow and member of the TUM Institute for Advanced Study (IAS). He (co-)authored 5 books and more than 600 publications in peer reviewed books (>30), journals (>80), and conference proceedings in the field (>13000 citations, h-index = 55). He is Editor in Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing, Associate and repeated Guest Editor for the Computer Speech and Language, associate editor for the IEEE Signal Processing Letters, IEEE Transactions on Cybernetics and the IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems, and guest editor for the IEEE Intelligent Systems Magazine, IEEE Transactions on Computational Intelligence and AI in Games, ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing, Communications and Applications, Knowledge-Based Systems, Methods, Neural Networks, Speech Communication, Image and Vision Computing, Cognitive Computation, and the EURASIP Journal on Advances in Signal Processing, reviewer for more than 100 leading journals and 80 conferences in the field, General Chair of aaac/IEEE ACII 2019 and ACM ICMI 2014, and as workshop and challenge organizer including the first of their kind INTERSPEECH 2009-2016 annual Computational Paralinguistics Challenges and the 2011-2016 annual Audio/Visual Emotion Challenge and Workshop and a Program Chair of INTERSPEECH 2019, ACM ICMI 2013, IEEE SocialCom 2012, and ACII 2011 and 2015, Area Chair of the ACM Multimedia, IEEE ICASSP, IEEE ICTAI, EURASIP EUSIPCO and program committee member of more than 180 international workshops and conferences. He won several awards including the IEEE ACII 2009 Best Technical Demonstration and the ICASSP CHiME Speech Separation and Recognition Challenge winning system/best paper in 2013, further best paper awards such as from the Audio Engineering Society annual meeting in 2014, first places in research challenges such as MIREX and MediaEval, and honourable mentioning such as in the ACM Multimedia Open-Source Software Competition in 2010 and 2013. In 2015, he has additionally been honoured as one of 40 extraordinary scientists under the age of 40 by the World Economic Forum and speaker at the Annual Meeting of the New Champions 2015 and was re-invited in 2016. His research has garnered over 7 million EUR in extramural funding: He is recipient of an ERC Starting Grant 2013 (9% acceptance rate) . He is a consultant of global enterprises such as HUAWEI and SAMSUNG and Chair of the W3C Linked Data Models for Emotion and Sentiment Analysis Community Group.