Visiting Speaker: Dr Björn Schuller - On Autism, Beats of the Heart, Cancer, Depression, Eye-contact and the Voice

Dr Björn Schuller

Computational Paralinguistics have a long tradition in healthcare: The voice provides surprisingly rich information on potential disorders of various kind - also beyond speech pathologies. These days, computers can infer a steadily increasing number of speaker's short-term and long-term states and traits - not only when literally saying "ahh", but from everyday spontaneous speech and partially even simple breathing. In this talk, I demonstrate the state-of-the-art for a series of such machine-recognition tasks including manifestations of autism, head and neck cancer, depression, intoxication, sleepiness, and many further such as cognitive and physical load or heart-rate and eye-contact from the human voice. Benchmark results and experiences stem from an overall of eleven research challenges I co-organised in recent years as well as three ongoing European projects. Going beyond mere recognition of such information, I want to touch upon how to automatically identify deviation from the normal voice.

Björn W. Schuller is a Senior Lecturer in Imperial College London's Department of Computing. He further heads the Machine Intelligence and Signal Processing Group at TUM/Germany where he obtained his doctoral and pre- and post-doctoral degrees. He is also the founding CEO of audEERING UG (limited). Previous major stays of his include the French CNRS-LIMSI near Paris/France, Joanneum Research in Graz/Austria and the University of Passau/Germany as well as permanent Visiting Professorship/Association with HIT/China and the University of Geneva/Switzerland. His work (>400 publications, >6000 citations, h-index = 39) focuses on Machine Learning for Affective Computing and Computational Paralinguistics. At present, he mainly coordinates the European ASC-Inclusion Project aiming to teach children on the autism spectrum about emotion by serious digital gaming and is a PI/partner in ERC Starting/Advanced Grants on computational voice analysis ("iHEARu" and "PROPEREMO"). Dr. Schuller is the current president of the Association for the Advancement of Affective Computing (AAAC) and was co-founding member and secretary of the steering committee and guest editor, and still serves as associate editor of the IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing, and several further IEEE and Elsevier journals, is a general chair of ACM ICMI 2014, and was a program chair of ACM ICMI 2013, IEEE SocialCom 2012, and ACII 2011 as well as initiator and main organiser of 11 international research challenges and workshops centred on recognising human affect and personality (the ComParE series at Interspeech, the AVEC series and MAPTRAITS at ACM Multimedia, ACII, and ICMI)