Distinguished Lecture Series: Philipp Müller

We are pleased to announce our upcoming ELLIS Unit Stuttgart Distinguished Lecture Series talk by Dr. Philipp Müller from the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems (MPI-IS) Stuttgart! Looking forward to seeing you all there! No registration necessary.

Title: Bridging Psychology and Multimodal AI for Human Behaviour Analysis

Abstract:  As artificial intelligence systems become increasingly integrated into our private and professional lives, enabling effective collaboration between humans and machines is more important than ever. For such collaboration to be valuable and intuitive, machines must develop a deeper understanding of human behaviour - how we communicate, express emotions, and direct our attention. In this talk, I will present my work on advancing the state of the art in human behaviour analysis, with an emphasis on the value of integrating perspectives from psychology with those offered by multimodal AI. This includes advances in the recognition of basic social cues such as eye contact, backchannels, or body movements, but also more complex phenomena such as emotion regulation. I will highlight the importance of establishing diverse benchmark datasets to measure and accelerate progress in the field and outline opportunities for the application of conversational behaviour analysis in psychiatry.

Bio: Philipp Müller leads the Independent Research Group Embodied Social Interaction at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems (MPI-IS) in Stuttgart, where he works at the intersection of multimodal AI, psychology, and robotics to lay the foundations for socially capable, embodied AI systems. He received a Bachelor’s Degree in Psychology as well as Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Computer Science from Saarland University. After a stay as a Visiting Student Researcher at Stanford University, he conducted his PhD research at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics on Sensing, Interpreting, and Anticipating Human Social Behaviour in the Real World. Before joining MPI-IS, he worked at the University of Stuttgart and at the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) in Saarbrücken.