The international ICMI Sustained Accomplishment Award was presented to Elisabeth André at this year's International Conference on Multimodal Interfaces (ICMI) in Montréal, Canada. The prestigious award is presented each year to a senior researcher who has made innovative, long-standing, and influential contributions to the field of multimodal interaction, interfaces, and systems. At the award ceremony, Elisabeth André delivered a keynote address titled: "Socially Interactive Artificial Intelligence: Past, Present and Future." In her keynote, she gave an overview of the history of socially interactive virtual agents and robots - a rapidly developing field of research in whose development Elisabeth André played a significant role. Already in the early 1990s, she had advanced virtual characters with communicative and social capabilities as a new paradigm for human-technology interaction.
Elisabeth André received her doctorate in computer science from Saarland University in 1995. Prior to that, she led several projects at the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence in Saarbrücken. In 2001, she accepted an appointment to the chair of Multimodal Human-Technology Interaction at the then newly established Institute of Computer Science at the University of Augsburg. André was involved as a DFG review board member from 2008 to 2012 and has been a member of the National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina and the Academia Europaea since 2010. In 2019, the German Informatics Society selected her as one of the "ten formative minds in German AI history." Earlier this year, she was awarded the most prestigious German research prize, the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize.