Members
Patrick Gebhard is a Research Fellow and Principal Researcher at the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence GmbH (DFKI) in Saarbrücken, Germany. Since 2007, he is head of the Affective Computing group in the Cognitive Assistants department. His research focuses on Affective Computing, a sub-field of Artificial Intelligence centered on human emotional intelligence and its employment for Human-Computer Interaction. He has fully coordinated or taken work package leads in several national and European research projects. He acquired a long-term experience with computational models for affect and social behavior and their employment to model socially interactive agents and their evaluation.
Research Interests: Computationally Modelling of Affect and Social Behavior, Socially Interactive Agents, Social Training
In the group: Management of projects and research. Responsible for computational models of emotion, emotion regulation, and social behavior models for socially interactive agents.
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patrick.gebhard@dfki.de
Dimitra Tsovaltzi is since 2020 a Senior Researcher at DFKI in Saarbrücken, Germany. In 2016, she was awarded the german degree of Habilitation (post-doctoral degree) for the Learning sciences from the Educational Technology and Knowledge Management department at Saarland University, where she held a faculty position until 2019. Before that, in 2010, she was awarded her interdisciplinary Ph.D. in automating feedback through schema theory for technology enhanced learning from the department of Informatics in collaboration with the Learning Sciences, Saarland University, and worked as part of the E-Learning group at DFKI.
Research Interests: Dimitra is interested in shaping societal change through technological support for group processes. She has been working on designing technologies to support the interplay of socio-emotional and cognitive factors for learning and group interaction, focusing on awareness tools, possibilities for dynamic scripting.
In the group: Dimitra works on models for socio-emotional interactions to leverage socio-emotional awareness for affective computing. This includes conceptual and empirical research taking into account technical requirements for development.
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dimitra.tsovaltzi@dfki.de
Benedikt Wirth is a Senior Researcher at the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence GmbH (DFKI) in Saarbrücken, Germany. He holds a master’s degree in psychology (University of Bamberg, 2014), a PhD in psychology (Saarland University, 2018) and a master’s degree in data science (Albstadt-Sigmaringen University, 2024). Before joining DFKI in 2023, Benedikt worked as a post-doctoral researcher at the Cognition & Action Lab at Saarland University.
Research interests: Benedikt is interested in various aspects of cognition and emotion both in natural (i.e., human) and artificial (i.e., deep neural networks) intelligence such as face recognition, visual attention, and social processing.
In the group: Benedikt is responsible for projects thematically located at the intersection of AI and psychology/psychiatry. These projects include digital phenotyping of psychiatric disorders based on patient-therapist interactions, prediction and prevention of post-operative mental illness, and emotion recognition from EEG signals.
Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=JxxJkaYAAAAJ&hl=en
ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8039-7316
benedikt.wirth@dfki.de
Tanja Schneeberger completed her Master’s degree in Psychology in 2014 in the Department of Industrial and Organizational Psychology at Saarland University. Following that, she became a part of the ACG in 2015, having previously worked in the Automotive Group at DFKI. Throughout her tenure at the ACG, Tanja obtained her PhD in 2023. Her doctoral thesis focused on exploring affective reactions towards socially interactive agents and their computational modelling.
Research Interests: Relationship between Human and Socially Interactive Agent
In the group: In experimental studies, in which we transfer aspects of human-human-interaction to human-agent-interaction my goal is to find out which role socially interactive agents can play for humans and how a successful relationship between an agent and a human can be created.
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Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.de/citations?user=ogfKtbcAAAAJ&hl=de
OrcID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7247-6978
tanja.schneeberger@dfki.de
Fabrizio Nunnari got a Ph.D. in Computer Science in 2005 on real-time 3D data visualization. From 2005 to 2012, he worked between academia and industry as research programmer. Since 2013, Fabrizio is a senior researcher at DFKI.
Research Interests: Real-time 3D Interactive Applications, Generation and Animation of Virtual Humans
In the group: Fabrizio takes care of everything related to the generation and animation of virtual humans and on the animation of virtual interpreters for Sign Language. Also working on the intersection between virtual humans and personality perception and on the use of machine learning for the interpretation of human behaviour.
Home Page: http://www.dfki.de/~fanu01/
Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.it/citations?user=rZVuaTIAAAAJ
OrcID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1596-4043
fabrizio.nunnari@dfki.de