Director

Prof. Dr.-Ing. Tanja Schultz


Curriculum Vitae

Tanja Schultz received her doctoral and diploma degree in Informatics from University of Karlsruhe, Germany in 2000 and 1995 respectively and successfully passed the German state examination for teachers of Mathematics, Sports, and Educational Science at Heidelberg University, in 1990.

In 2000 she joined Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania where she holds a position as Research Professor at the Language Technologies Institute. From 2007 to 2015 she was a Full Professor at the Department of Informatics of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) in Germany before she accepted an offer from the University of Bremen in April 2015.

Since 2007, Tanja Schultz directs the Cognitive Systems Lab, where her research activities focus on human-machine communication with a particular emphasis on multilingual speech processing and human-machine interfaces. Together with her team, she investigates the processing, recognition and interpretation of biosignals, i.e. human signals resulting from physical and mental activities, to enable human interaction with machines in a natural way.

Tanja Schultz received several awards for her work, such as the FZI award for an outstanding Ph.D. thesis (2001), the Allen Newell Medal for Research Excellence from Carnegie Mellon (2002), the ISCA best journal award for her publication on language independent acoustic modeling (2002) and on Silent Speech Interfaces (2015), the Plux Wireless award (2011) for the development of Airwriting, the Alcatel-Lucent Research Award for Technical Communication (2012), the Otto-Haxel Award (2013), a Google Research Award (2013 and 2020) as well as several best paper awards. She is the author of more than 450 articles published in books, journals, and proceedings, and is regularly invited as panelist and keynote speaker.  Tanja Schultz serves as a member for numerous conference committees, as Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions (2002-2004), as an Associate Editor for ACM TALLIP (since 2013), as editorial board member of Speech Communication (since 2001), and served as board member and elected president of the International Speech Communication Association ISCA from 2007-2015.

Professional Preparation and Appointments

  • Since 04/2015 Full Professur (W3), Chair for Cognitive Systems, Faculty 3 - Mathematic and Computer Science, University of Bremen
  • 05/2007 – 03/2015 Full Professur (W3), Chair for Cognitive Systems, Department of Informatics, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT)
  • Since 06/2007 Director of the Cognitive Systems Laboratory
  • 2007-2022 Adjunct Research Professor, Language Technologies Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania USA
  • 07/2002 – 05/2007 Research Scientist / Research Ass Professor, Language Technologies Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania USA
  • 01/2001 – 06/2002 Research Associate, Language Technologies Institute, Interactive Systems Lab, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania USA
  • 09/2000 – 12/2000 Postdoctoral Fellow at the Interactive Systems Laboratories, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania USA
  • 06/2000 Doctoral degree in Computer Science (Dr.-Ing.) at the University of Karlsruhe; Dissertation: Multilingual Speech Recognition – Combination of Acoustic Model for Rapid Portation to new Languages
  • 1995 – 2000 Graduate Research Assistant / PhD Student at the University of Karlsruhe, Institute for Logic, Complexity and Deduction Systems
  • 1990 – 1995 Diploma degree in Computer Science at the University of Karlsruhe, Germany
  • 1983 – 1989 Masters in Mathematics (07/1989), Sports, Physical Education and Educational Science (11/1989) at the Ruprecht-Karl Universität Heidelberg, Germany

 

Current Positions und Functions

  • since 2022 Spokesperson of the DFG Research Unit FOR 5347 LifespanAI
  • since 2022 Board of Trustees of Deutscher Studienpreis, Körber-Stiftung
  • since 2022 Evaluation commission of the Wissenschaftsrat
  • since 2021 Board of Directors DFG GRK 2739 KD²School
  • since 2021 Co-spokesperson lead project “Artificial Intelligence” University Bremen Alliance of Research (UBRA)
  • since 2021 Board of Directors “AICenter4healthcare”, UBRA
  • since 2021 Board of Trustees of the Fraunhofer Institute of Optronics, System Technologies and Image Exploitation (IOSB)
  • since 2020 Board of Trustees of the Fraunhofer Institut for Digital Media Technology (IDMT)
  • since 2020 Chair of the Advisory Board of the UKRI Centre for Doctoral Training in Speech and Language Technologies, University of Sheffield, UK
  • since 2019 Board of Directors, Leibniz-Science Campus on Digital Public Health
  • since 2019 Spokesperson of high-profile area Minds, Media, Machines at Uni Bremen
  • since 2017 Board of Directors, DFG CRC 1320 EASE
  • since 2016 Inter­national Advisory Board of ISCA, International Speech Communication Association
  • since 2007 Managing Director of the Cognitive Systems lab

Awards and Honors

  • 2022 IEEE Signal Processing Society Distinguished Lecturer for term 2022-2023
  • 2021 AAIA Fellow (Asia-Pacific Artificial Intelligence Association)
  • 2020 IEEE Fellow (Multilingual Speech Recognition and Biosignal Processing)
  • 2020 Google Faculty Research Award for the project "End‐to‐End Silent Speech Conversion based on Electromyography”
  • 2017 EASA Fellow (European Academy of Sciences and Arts)
  • 2016 ISCA Fellow (International Association of Speech Communication
  • 2013 Otto Haxel Award together with C. Amma and M. Georgi
  • 2013 Google Faculty Research Award
  • 2012 Research Award Technical Communication 2012 from Alcatel-Lucent Stiftung
  • 2011 PLUX Wireless Biosignals Award with C. Amma and D. Gehrig
  • 2005 Carnegie Mellon Language Technologies Institute Junior Faculty Chair
  • 2002 Allen Newell Medal for Research Excellence, Carnegie Mellon University, with A. Waibel
  • 2001 FZI Award for an outstanding dissertation

Awards for Publications

  • 2024 Highly Cited Paper (top 1% in Engineering by WoS) in IEEE Sensors with H. Liu, S. Zhang, H. Gamboa, T. Xue and C. Zhou

  • 2022 Best Paper Finalist SIGMAP with H. Liu and T. Xue

  • 2022 Best Student Paper Finalist BIOSIGNALS (BIOSTEC) with Y. Hartmann and H. Liu
  • 2019 Best Student Paper Award BIODEVICES (BIOSTEC) with H. Liu

  • 2018 BCI Award 3rd place with the contribution “Brain‐to‐Speech” with C. Herff, L. Diener, E. Mugler, M. Slutzky, D. Krusienski

  • 2015 ICSA / EURASIP Best Journal paper award Speech Communication

  • 2015 Best Student Paper Award BIOSIGNALS with M. Georgi and C. Amma

  • 2013 Best Student Paper Award BIOSIGNALS with M. Wand, M. Janke and C. Schulte

  • 2013 Geographic Finalist Europe IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society with D. Heger, F. Putze und C. Herff

  • 2012 Best Paper Award Wearable Computing, with C. Amma and M. Georgi

  • 2010 Best Student Paper Finalist, Social Robotics with D. Heger and F. Putze

  • 2009 Best selected Papers BIOSTEC with M. Wand

  • 2008 Best selected Papers BIOSTEC with S-C. Jou

  • 2006 ISCA Best Demo Award at Interspeech 2006 with S-C. Jou and A. Waibel

  • 2002 ICSA Best Journal paper award Speech Communication

Supervised Dissertations (Main Advisor)

Lisa-Maria Vortmann (Dr.-Ing., University of Bremen 5/2022),<br /> Attentiony-Aware Interaction Systems for Augmented Reality. Referent:in Felix Putze und Tanja Schultz, Koreferent: Mathias Benedek (University of Graz, Austria)
→ PostDoc at the Computational & Cognitive Neuroscience Lab, UC San Diego, CA, USA

Hui Liu (Dr.-Ing., University of Bremen 11/2021),
Biosignal Processing and Activity Modeling for Multimodal Human Activity Recognition. Referentin: Tanja Schultz, Koreferent: Hugo Filipe Silveira Gamboa (Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal)
→ PostDoc at CSL

Miguel Angrick (Dr.-Ing., University of Bremen 9/2021),
Speech synthesis from invasive brain signals: From offline analysis to closed-loop speech decoding. Referentin: Tanja Schultz, Koreferent: Dean Krusienski (Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, VA, USA)
→ PostDoc at Johns Hopkins Universität, Baltimore, MD, USA

Mazen Salous (Dr.-Ing., University of Bremen 6/2021),
User Modeling for Adaptation of Cognitive Systems Referentin: Tanja Schultz, Koreferent: Bettina von Helversen (University of Bremen)
→ Researcher at OFFIS - Institute for Information Technology, Oldenburg, Germany

Lorenz Diener (Dr.-Ing., University of Bremen 04/2021),
The Impact of Audible Feedback on EMG-to-Speech Conversion Referentin: Tanja Schultz, Koreferent: Thomas Hueber (CRNS, GIPSA-lab, Grenoble, France)
→ Machine Learning Scientist, Microsoft, Talinn, Estland

Ass. Professor Christian Herff (Dr.-Ing., University of Bremen 12/2016),
Speech Processes for Brain-Computer Interfaces. Referentin: Tanja Schultz, Koreferent: Dean J Krusienski (Old Dominion University, Norfolk, VA)
→ Assistant Professor at Maastricht University

Matthias Janke, (Dr.-Ing., KIT 04/2016), 
EMG-to-Speech: Direct Generation of Speech from Facial Electromyographic Signals. Referentin: Tanja Schultz, Koreferent: Alan W Black (Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA)
→ Software Engineer Schaeffler, Herzogenaurach, Germany

Dominic Telaar (Dr.-Ing., KIT 12/2015), 
Error Correction based on Error Signatures applied to automatic speech recognition. Referentin: Tanja Schultz, Koreferent: Walter F. Tichy (KIT, Karlsruhe, Germany)
→ Manager at Apple Inc., Cupertino CA, USA

Dominic Heger (Dr.-Ing., KIT 07/2015), 
Advancing Pattern Recognition Techniques for Brain-Computer Interfaces: Optimizing Discriminability, Compactness, and Robustness, Referentin: Tanja Schultz, Koreferent: Rainer Stiefelhagen (KIT, Karlsruhe, Germany)
→ Team Leader at Zalando SE, Berlin, Germany

Christoph Amma (Dr.-Ing., KIT 07/2015), 
Modellierung und Erkennung dreidimensionaler Handschrift mittels Inertialsensorik, Referentin: Tanja Schultz, Koreferent: Tamim Asfour (KIT, Karlsruhe, Germany)
→ Founder Company Kinemic GmbH

Dirk Gehrig (Dr.-Ing., KIT 06/2015), 
Automatic Recognition of Concurrent and Coupled Human Motion Sequences, Referentin: Tanja Schultz, Koreferent: Rüdiger Dillmann (KIT, Karlsruhe, Germany)
→ Senior Software Developer, Matrix Vision GmbH, Karlsruhe, Germany

Professor Tim Schlippe (Dr.-Ing., KIT 12/2014), 
Rapid Generation of Pronunciation Dictionaries for New Domains and Languages, Referentin: Tanja Schultz, Marelie Davel (North West University, Potchefstroom, South Africa)
→ Full Professor, IU International University of Applied Science, Germany

Felix Putze (Dr.-Ing., KIT 10/2014), 
Adaptive Cognitive Interaction Systems, Referentin: Tanja Schultz, Koreferent: Joachim Funke (University of Heidelberg, Germany)
→ Senior Researcher "Kognitive Interaktionsstrategien" at CSL

Professor Thang Ngoc Vu (Dr.-Ing., KIT 01/2014), 
Automatic Speech Recognition for Low-resource Languages and Accents Using Multilingual and Crosslingual Information, Referentin: Tanja Schultz, Koreferent: Etienne Barnard (North West University, Potchefstroom, South Africa)
→ Full Professor, University of Stuttgart, Germany

Ass. Professor Michael Wand (Dr.-Ing., KIT 01/2014), 
Advancing Electromyographic Continuous Speech Recognition: Signal Preprocessing and Modeling, Referentin: Tanja Schultz, Koreferent: Philip Green (U Sheffield, UK)
→ Ass. Professor SUPSI and Senior Researcher at Swiss AI Lab IDSIA, Lugano, Switzerland

Udhay Nallasamy (PhD, CMU 10/2013), 
Adaptation techniques to improve ASR performance on accented speakers, Referentin: Tanja Schultz, Committee: Alan W Black (CMU), Florian Metze (CMU), George Saon (IBM Watson Research Center, USA)
→ Manager und Applied Research at Apple Inc., Cupertino CA, USA

Roger Hsiao (PhD, CMU 01/2012), 
Generalized Discriminative Training for Speech Recognition, Referentin: Tanja Schultz, Committee: Florian Metze (CMU), Alan W Black (CMU), Monika Woszczyna (M*Modal, Pittsburgh, PA USA)
→ Research Engineer und Manager at Apple Inc., Cupertino CA, USA

Professor Wilson (Yik-Cheung) Tam (PhD, CMU 07/2009), 
Rapid Unsupervised Topic Adaptation - a Latent Semantic Approach, Referentin: Tanja Schultz, Committee: Alex Waibel (CMU), Stephan Vogel (CMU), Sanjeev P. Khudanpur (Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore USA)
→ Full Professor an der NYU Shanghai

Stan (Szu-Chen) Jou (PhD, CMU 08/2008), 
Automatic Speech Recognition on Vibrocervigraphic and Electromyographic Signals, Referentin: Tanja Schultz, Committee: Alex Waibel (CMU), Alan W Black (CMU), Charles Jorgensen (NASA Ames Center, CA USA)
→ Senior Engineer at Synopsys, Taipei, Taiwan

Professor Qin Jin (PhD, CMU 11/2006, 
Robust Speaker Recognition, Referentin: Tanja Schultz, Alex Waibel (CMU), Committee: Alan W Black (CMU), Douglas A. Reynolds (Lincoln Labs, MIT)
→ Full Professor at Remin University of China, Beijing City, China


Co-Supervised Dissertations, External Reviewer

More than 40 dissertations as second advisor, external examiner or PhD committee member

2022Florian Ahrens (Uni Bremen, second advisor), Jutta Hild (KIT, second advisor)
2021 Konrad Gadzicki (Uni Bremen, second advisor), Joana Correia (CMU, thesis committee)
2020Chenglin Xu (Nanyang Technology University, Examiner), Fabian Honecker (Bundeswehr Uni München, second advisor)
2019 Hakim Si Mohammed (INSA/INRIA Rennes, Examiner), Tobias de Taillez (Uni Oldenburg, second advisor), Bahman Mirheidari (Uni Sheffield, External examiner), Berthold Bäumler (Uni Bremen, committee member)
2018Marina Zimmermann (EPFL, Thesis Committee)
2017Daniel Nyga (University of Bremen, Thesis Committee); Florent Bocquelet (Universite Grenoble Alpes Frankreich, External Reviewer)
2016 Mathias Landhäußer (KIT, Co-Advisor)
2015 Sabine Weyand (University of Toronto Kanada, External Reviewer); Joao Miranda (Technico Lisboa - Carnegie Mellon University, Thesis Committee)
2014 Sven Körner (KIT, Co-Advisor); Tim Pozehl (TU Berlin, External Reviewer); Arseniy Gorin (Universite Lorraine Frankreich, External Reviewer); Thiago Fraga (Universite Paris Sud Frankreich, External Reviewer)
2013 Christian Bauer (KIT, Co-Advisor)
2012 Farzaneh Ahmadi (Nanyang Technological University Singapur, External Reviewer); Hui Liang (EPFL/IDIAP Lausanne Schweiz, External Reviewer)
2011 Hanno Harland (KIT, Co-Advisor); Stephan Heuer (KIT, Co-Advisor); Andreas Sandmair (KIT, Co-Advisor); Tong Rong (Nanyang Technological University Singapur, External Reviewer)
2010 Matthias Paulik (KIT, Co-Advisor); Kishore Prahallad (CMU, Thesis Committee); Sopheap Seng (LIG Grenoble Frankreich, External Reviewer)
2009 Sebastian Stüker (KIT, Co-Advisor); Rania Bayeh (l’École Nationale Supérieure des Télécommunications Paris, External Reviewer)
2008 Matthias Eck (KIT, Co-Advisor); Christian Fügen (KIT, Co-Advisor); Ales Fexa (KIT, Co-Advisor); John Kominek (CMU, Thesis Committee); Ciro Martins (Universidade de Aveiro Portugal, External Reviewer)
2007 Girija Chetty (University of Canberra Australia, External Reviewer); Stephen Choularton (Macquarie University Sydney Australien, External Reviewer)
2006 Rong Zhang (CMU, Thesis Committee)
2005 Fei Huang (CMU, Thesis Committee)
2004 Hua Yu (CMU, Co-Advisor)
2001 Laura Tomokyo Mayfield (CMU, Thesis Committee)

Publications

Google Scholar of Tanja Schultz

ORCID 0000-0002-9809-7028 of Tanja Schultz

DBLP of Tanja Schultz

Semantic Scholar of Tanja Schultz

Publications (pdf as copyright permits) on our CSL Publikationsserver

 

10 selected publications:

  • M Angrick, M Ottenhoff, L Diener, D Ivucic, G Ivucic, S Goulis, J Saal, AJ Colon, L Wagner, DJ Krusienski, PL Kubben, T Schultz, C Herff, Real-time Synthesis of Imagined Speech Processes from Minimally Invasive Recordings of Neural Activity, Nature Communications Biology 4, 1055, 2021.
  • M Barandas, D Folgado, L Fernandes, S Santos, M Abreu, P Bota, H Liu, T Schultz, H Gamboa, TSFEL: Time Series Feature Extraction Library. SoftwareX, volume 11, p. 100456, 2020.
  • T Schultz, M Wand, C Herff, DJ Krusienski, T Hueber, J Brumberg, Biosignal-based Spoken Communication: A Survey. IEEE Transactions of Acoustic, Speech, and Language Processing, volume 25, pp. 2257-2271, 2017.
  • C Herff, D Heger, A De Pesters, D Telaar, P Brunner, G Schalk, T Schultz (2015): Brain-to-text: Decoding spoken phrases from phone representations in the brain,Frontiers in neuroscience 9, 217.
  • L Besacier, E Barnard, A Karpov, T Schultz (2014): Automatic speech recognition for under-resourced languages: A survey. Speech Communication 56, 85-100
  • B Denby, T Schultz, K Honda, T Hueber, JM Gilbert, JS Brumberg (2010): Silent Speech Interfaces. Speech Communication 52 (4), 270-287, 2010 (Best Journal Paper Award, Speech Communication).
  • T Schultz, M Wand (2010): Modeling coarticulation in EMG-based continuous speech recognition. Speech Communication 52 (4), 341-353, 2010.
  • T Schultz, K Kirchhoff (Eds). Multilingual Speech Processing, Academic Press, Elsevier 2006.
  • T Schultz (2002): GlobalPhone: A multilingual speech and text database developed at Karlsruhe University. In Proc. Interspeech 2002.
  • T Schultz, A Waibel (2001): Language-independent and language-adaptive acoustic modeling for speech recognition. Speech Communication 35 (1), 31-51, 2001 (Best Journal Paper Award, Speech Communication).