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 (ranked #30 in THE World University Ranking 2024).
Since 2023, he is Full Professor of Health Informatics at TUM and Core Member of the Munich Data Science Institute (MDSI) in Munich/Germany. At the same time, he is Professor of Artificial Intelligence in the Department of Computing at Imperial College London/UK (ranked #8 in THE World University Ranking 2024) since 2018 where he heads the Group on Language Audio & Music (GLAM), previously being a Reader in Machine Learning since 2015 and Senior Lecturer since 2013. Further, he is the co-founding CEO and current CSO of audEERING GmbH – a TUM start-up on intelligent audio engineering since its launch in 2012. 2017-2023, he was Full Professor and Chair of Embedded Intelligence for Health Care and Wellbeing at the University of Augsburg/Germany (ranked #801-900 as university in the ARWU Ranking 2019) remaining a Guest Professor until 2024. 2021-22, he was a member of the Alan Turing Institute and Royal Statistical Society Lab (Turing-RSS Lab), providing independent research leadership to the Data, Analytics and Surveillance Group, a part of the UK Health Security Agency. 2021-22 he was also a Guest Professor at Southeast University (ranked #101-150 as university and and #20 in engineering in ARWU 2020/16 World Ranking) in Nanjing, China. In 2019, he was appointed as Honourary Dean of the Centre for Affective Intelligence at Tianjin Normal University, Tianjin, P.R. China. In 2014-17 he was Full Professor and Chair of Complex and Intelligent Systems at the University of Passau/Germany (ranked #201-250 as university and #151-175 in computer science in THE World University Ranking 2018) where he previously headed the Chair of Sensor Systems in 2013. In 2006-14 he headed the Machine Intelligence and Signal Processing Junior Group at TUM. 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 (ranked #151-200 as university and #9 in engineering in ARWU 2018/16 World Ranking) and a Visiting Professor at the Université de Genève in Geneva/Switzerland (ranked #60 in ARWU World Ranking 2018) in the Centre Interfacultaire en Sciences Affectives and remained an appointed associate of the institute until 2017. In 2017, he was also guest lecturing at Southeast University in Nanjing/P.R. China (ranked #201-300 as university and #20 in engineering in ARWU 2018/16 World Ranking). In 2016, and 2018-20 he held also a position as Professor in the Department of Construction Economics and Property Management of the Vilnius Gediminas Technical University/Lithuania (ranked #551-600 as university and #101-151 in Civil & Structural Engineering in QS World Ranking 2018). In 2012 he was with Joanneum Research, Institute for Information and Communication Technologies in Graz/Austria, working in the Research Group for Remote Sensing and Geoinformation and the Research Group for Space and Acoustics remaining an expert consultant of the institute 2013-2017. In 2011 he was guest lecturer at the Università Politecnica delle Marche (ranked #401-500 as university and 301-400 in engineering in THE World Ranking 2018) 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 (ranked #1 in Nature Index 2016) LIMSI Spoken Language Processing Group in Orsay/France, and was a visiting scientist at Imperial College. Best known are his works advancing Machine and Deep Learning for Computer Audition and Multimodal Human Data Analysis with applications in Digital Health and Affective Computing.
Dr. Schuller is Fellow of the ACM for empirical and theoretical contributions to the development of computer audition, affective computing, and health informatics, Fellow of the IEEE for contributions to Computer Audition, Fellow of the ISCA for contributions to Computational Paralinguistics, and research and leadership in the Speech Processing community, Fellow of the BCS, Fellow of the AAAC, and Fellow of the ELLIS. Before, he was President of the Association for the Advancement of Affective Computing (AAAC, registered Charity in the UK, 2013-2015), elected member of the IEEE Speech and Language Processing Technical Committee, and Honorary Fellow and member of the TUM Institute for Advanced Study (IAS). He (co-)authored 5 books and more than 1,500 publications in peer reviewed journals (>250), books, and conference proceedings in the field leading to 60,000+ citations (h-index 110+). Hi is Field Chief Editor of Frontiers in Digital Health and Editor in Chief of the AI Open Journal. He was co-founding member and secretary of the steering committee and guest editor, and served as associate editor and editor in chief of the IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing, general chair of aaac/IEEE ACII 2019 and ACM ICMI 2014, and workshop and challenge organizer including the first of their kind INTERSPEECH 2009-2021 annual Computational Paralinguistics Challenges and the 2011-2019 annual Audio/Visual Emotion Challenge and Workshop and a program chair of INTERSPEECH 2019, ACM ICMI 2019 and 2013, IEEE SocialCom 2012, and ACII 2011 and 2015, area chair of the ACM Multimedia, IEEE ICASSP, IEEE ICTAI, IJCAI, EURASIP EUSIPCO and program committee member of more than 200 international workshops and conferences. He won more than 50 awards, 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. In 2017, his company secured the 1st place as “Innovator of The Year” of the Digital Marketing Innovation World Cup 2017. In 2019, he received the IEEE Computer Society Golden Core Award. In 2024, he was selected as ACM Distinguished Speaker for the term 2024-2027 and IEEE Signal Processing Society Distinguished Lecturer 2024. His research has garnered over 15 million EUR in extramural funding: He is recipient of individual excellence funding including an ERC Starting Grant 2013 (9% acceptance rate) and a German Research Foundation (DFG) Reinhart Koselleck-Grant. In the European Community (EC) Horizon 2020 programme, he is a beneficiary in more than 20 projects. Former steering and involvement in research projects includes the EC funded ASC-Inclusion STREP project as coordinator and the ERC Advanced Grant PROPEREMO as beneficiary, and projects funded by the British ESRC and EPSRC, German DFG, BMBF, and companies such as BMW, or HUAWEI. Advisory board activities comprise his role as consultant of global enterprises such as BARCLAYS, GN Store Nord A/S, HUAWEI, Informetis, and SAMSUNG and start-ups such as SensAura Tech and fluent.ai and chair of the W3C Linked Data Models for Emotion and Sentiment Analysis Community Group and as an invited expert in the W3C Emotion Incubator and Emotion Markup Language Incubator Groups.