Prof. Björn W. Schuller of Technical University of Munich

From understanding human speech and music to perceiving complex soundscapes, the field of computer audition is rapidly evolving toward a new frontier: systems that approach general listening intelligence and even exceed human auditory capabilities. In this Distinguished IEEE SPS lecture, we will trace the journey from today’s specialized audio recognition systems to tomorrow’s general-purpose and “super” computer audition—AI that can listen, interpret, and act across a vast range of acoustic environments. Building on decades of research in speech and audio processing, affective and paralinguistic computing, and multimodal machine learning, the talk will showcase how advances in large-scale models, self-supervised learning, and cross-modal integration are reshaping what machines can hear and understand breaking audio down into its sources and richly attributing states and traits to these. Applications range from voice biomarkers in healthcare and emotion-aware assistants to advanced hearing technologies—areas directly relevant to industry leaders such as Starkey. Yet, the move toward general and superhuman audition also raises critical questions. How do we ensure robustness, interpretability, and fairness in AI that listens to—and learns from—our most personal signals? How can we balance technical progress with ethical responsibility and user trust? And what are the implications of AI systems that may one day surpass human hearing in scope and precision? This talk will offer a forward-looking perspective on the science and impact of tomorrow’s computer audition, highlighting both the opportunities and challenges of designing AI that truly listens.

Biography:

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.

From 2023, he is Full Professor of Health Informatics at TUM in Munich/Germany. Since 2017, he is Full Professor and Chair of Embedded Intelligence for Health Care and Wellbeing at the University of Augsburg/Germany. At the same time, he is Professor of Artificial Intelligence in the Department of Computing at Imperial College London/UK 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. Dr. Schuller was also a member of the Alan Turing Institute and Royal Statistical Society Lab (Turing-RSS Lab) (2021-2022), Guest Professor, Southeast University in Nanjing, China (2021-2022), appointed as Honourary Dean of the Centre for Affective Intelligence at Tianjin Normal University, Tianjin, P.R. China (2019), Full Professor and Chair of Complex and Intelligent Systems at the University of Passau/Germany (2014-2017) where he previously headed the Chair of Sensor Systems in 2013.

Dr. Schuller is Fellow of the IEEE (2018); Fellow, International Speech Communication Association (ISCA, 2020); Fellow, British Computer Society (BCS, 2020); Fellow, Association for the Advancement of Affective Computing (AAAC, 2021); Fellow, European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Systems (ELLIS, 2021); Senior Member, ACM (2018). Before, he was President, Association for the Advancement of Affective Computing (AAAC, registered Charity in the UK, 2013-2015); elected member, IEEE Speech and Language Processing Technical Committee (2013-2018), and Honorary Fellow and member, TUM Institute for Advanced Study (IAS, 2013-2014).

Dr. Schuller was co-founding member and secretary of the steering committee (2009-2013) and Guest Editor, and served as Associate Editor and Editor in Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing (2015-2018), 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.