Director

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

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