Prof. Dr. Elisabeth André - Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Laureate 2021

The Leibniz Prize is awarded to Elisabeth André for establishing the research field of conversational emotional agents in the field of artificial intelligence. It provides the foundations for future AI systems to act in a more human-centered way. Already in her doctoral studies, André focused on verbal and nonverbal signals for human-machine communication. Furthermore, she devoted early work to the now-topical issue of trust in human-machine communication, established pain recognition as a relevant capability for machine-learning-based health assistance, and addressed questions about the acceptance of machine autonomy. Finally, with the development of the open-source SSI (Social Signal Interpretation) framework for recording and analyzing multimodal signals such as eye movement, speech, and gestures, André has succeeded in making a contribution that goes far beyond computer science. Today, SSI is used worldwide for a wide variety of tasks, such as equipping robots or virtual characters with the ability to recognize and respond to a human's emotions.

Elisabeth André received her doctorate in computer science from Saarland University in 1995. Before 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 since 2010. In 2019, the German Informatics Society elected her as one of the "ten formative minds in German AI history".

Source: DFG

 

 

 

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