I am a Professor of Language Generation and Dialogue Systems at the Otto-Friedrich-University of Bamberg, Germany, since 2022. Previously, I was Dialogue Research Lead at Mercedes Benz Research & Development in Sindelfingen, Germany, leading the Speech Technology research group and a Research Associate at the Spoken Dialogue Systems Group at the University of Cambridge, UK. I have received my Diploma (MSc) in Computer Science from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany, in 2010 and my doctorate (PhD) on “User-centred Adaptive Spoken Dialogue Modelling” at the Dialogue Systems Group at Ulm University, Germany, in 2015. My research interests focus on Natural Language Processing and Dialogue Systems, especially on enabling natural spoken interaction between humans and machines through dialogue. I regularly serve under different roles in the ACL and SIGDIAL community and have been a co-organizer of multiple workshops.

• Program Chair of NLP4ConvAI Workshop 2022
• Program Chair of IWSDS 2021
• Area Chair of Track “Dialog and Interactive Systems” at EMNLP-IJCNLP, ACL, EMNLP, NAACL-HLT, EACL, ACL-IJCNLP, since 2019
• Publication Chair of the SIGdial Meeting on Discourse and Dialogue 2019, 2020
• Journal Reviewer for Artificial Intelligence, Computer Speech and Language, Dialogue and Discourse, Journal of Ambient Intelligence and Smart Environments, IEEE Signal Processing Letters, Natural Language Engineering, Review of Managerial Science, Sensors, International Journal of Information Technology & Decision Making
• Conference / Workshop Reviewer for Meeting of Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) Conference, Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics – Human Language Technologies (NAACL-HLT), Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, Interspeech Conference, SIGDial Meeting on Discourse and Dialogue, Language Resources and Evaluation Conference Spoken Language Technology Workshop (SLT), International Conference on Computational Linguistics (CoLing), International Workshop on Spoken Dialogue Systems (IWSDS), International Conference on Intelligent Environments (IE), NIPS Workshop on Conversational AI: Today’s Practice and Tomorrow’s Potential, International Conference on Signal Processing and Communication Systems, RE-WOCHAT, WOCHAT
• Mentor in the Mentoring Program of the SIGDIAL Meeting on Discourse and Dialogue
• YRRSDS Advisory Committee 2021
• Co-Organizer of the Young Researchers’ Roundtable on Spoken Dialogue Systems (YRRSDS) 2014, 2015