23 Multimodal Affect Databases: Collection, Challenges, and Chances

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 private lectureship (venia legendi, German PD) 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 (Munich University of Technology), repeatedly the number one German university in different rankings and among its two persistent Excellence Universities. At present, he is a Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in Machine Learning in Imperial College London's (repeatedly ranked as a world top five (QS) or top ten (THE) university in diverse rankings) Department of Computing's Logic and Artificial Intelligence Section's Machine Learning Group in London/UK (since 2013) and a tenured faculty member heading the Machine Intelligence and Signal Processing (MISP) Group at TUM’s Institute for Human-Machine Communication since 2006 as well as CEO of audEERING UG (limited). Since 2013 he is also a permanent Visiting Professor in the School of Computer Science and Technology at the Harbin Institute of Technology, Harbin/P.R. China. In 2013 he was also heading the Institute for Sensor Systems as full professor at the University of Passau in Passau/Germany and a Visiting Professor at the Université de Genève in Geneva/Switzerland in the Centre Interfacultaire en Sciences Affectives and remains an appointed associate of the institute. In 2012 he was with JOANNEUM RESEARCH, Institute for Information and Communication Technologies in Graz/Austria, working in the Research Group for Remote Sensing and Geoinformation and the Research Group for Space and Acoustics - currently he is an expert consultant of the institute. In 2011 he was guest lecturer at the Università Politecnica delle Marche (UNIVPM) in Ancona/Italy and visiting researcher in the Machine Learning Research Group of NICTA in Sydney/Australia. From 2009 to 2010 he lived in Paris/France and was with the CNRS-LIMSI Spoken Language Processing Group in Orsay/France dealing with affective and social signals in speech. In 2010 he was also a visiting scientist in the Imperial College London's Department of Computing in London/UK working on audiovisual behaviour recognition. Best known are his works advancing Machine Intelligence and Data Mining, Information Systems and Retrieval for spoken and written language, and Affective and Mobile Computing. Dr. Schuller is president of the Association for the Advancement of Affective Computing (AAAC, former HUMAINE Association), Honorary Fellow and member of the TUM Institute for Advanced Study (IAS), elected member of the IEEE Speech and Language Processing Technical Committee, and member of the ACM, IEEE and ISCA and (co-)authored 5 books and more than 390 publications in peer reviewed books (>20), journals (>50), and conference proceedings in the field leading to more than 5900 citations (h-index = 39). He 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, associate and repeated guest editor for the Computer Speech and Language, associate editor for the IEEE Signal Processing Letters, IEEE Transactions on Cybernetics and the IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems, and guest editor for the IEEE Intelligent Systems Magazine, Neural Networks, Speech Communication, Image and Vision Computing, Cognitive Computation, and the EURASIP Journal on Advances in Signal Processing, reviewer for more than 70 leading journals and 50 conferences in the field, co-general chair of ACM ICMI 2014, and as workshop and challenge organizer including the first of their kind INTERSPEECH 2009 Emotion, 2010 Paralinguistic, 2011 Speaker State, 2012 Speaker Trait, and 2013 and 2014 Computational Paralinguistics Challenges and the 2011, 2012, 2013, and 2014 Audio/Visual Emotion Challenge and Workshop and program chair of the ACM ICMI 2013, IEEE SocialCom 2012, and ACII 2011, and program committee member of more than 100 international workshops and conferences. He is recipient of an ERC Starting Grant 2013 (9% acceptance rate) for the iHEARu project dealing with Intelligent systems' Holistic Evolving Analysis of Real-life Universal speaker characteristics. Further steering and involvement in current and past research projects includes the European Community funded ASC-Inclusion STREP project as coordinator and the awarded SEMAINE project, and projects funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) and companies such as BMW, Continental, Daimler, HUAWEI, Siemens, Toyota, and VDO. Advisory board activities comprise his membership as invited expert in the W3C Emotion Incubator and Emotion Markup Language Incubator Groups.