On thursday, november 06th 2014 Professor Dr. Björn Schuller held a talk at an IEEE Professors Personally Event.

Professor Schuller has already worked at the University of Passau for quite some time. First, he was the substitute professor of the Chair of Sensor Technology. Since October 1st 2014, he now holds the Chair of Complex Systems Engineering.

He started his presentation by giving the audience some details of his
career progression up until now. He pursued and completed his studies in Electrical Engineering and Information Technology at the Technische Universität München (University of Technology Munich). In 2006 he obtained his doctorate at the aforementioned university and
in 2012 he was promoted to professor as well as co-founding a start-up. So far, Professor Schuller has worked at research facilities in
France, Great Britain and Austria. On top of that he worked as a visiting professor and scientist in Australia, Switzerland and the Netherlands. Furthermore, he gained the status of visiting professor at the Chinese Harbin Institute of Technology in 2013.

Afterwards, the professor gave several examples of his research thus
far. One of his numerous projects included the recognization of emotions
based on language as a possibility of helping autistic children understand and verbalize emotions. Among others, he also did some research into analyzing music as well
as creating an avatar who is capable of holding a conversation and reacting to human emotions. Professor Schuller is currently working on a project focusing on
language analysis for which he received an ERC Starting Grant. This project bears the name ‘iHEARu’.

Björn Schuller’s passions include publishing, as one can easily
recognize by looking at his numerous scientific puflications. On top of that Professor Schuller publishes the journal ‘IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing’. Among other hobbies, he also practices as well as teaches martial arts
and plays several musical instruments. Additionally, he used to work as a DJ.

Lastly, he told the audience about the differences in the countries he
has visited concerning research and education. Take Great Britain for instance: Because of the high tuition costs of
attending university, professors in particular but also educational institutions in general are much more service-oriented than in Germany, e.g., professors also hold tutorials or mark exams.

We want to thank Professor Schuller for giving this interesting and educative talk and are pleased that he joined the University of Passau.