Elisabeth André is a full professor of Computer Science and Founding Chair of Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence at Augsburg University in Germany where she has been since 2001. She has multiple degrees in computer science from Saarland University, including a doctorate. Previously, she was a principal researcher at the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI GmbH) in Saarbrücken.

Elisabeth André has a long track record in multimodal human-machine interaction, embodied conversational agents, affective computing and social signal processing. Her work has won many awards including the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz Prize 2021, with 2.5 Mio € the highest endowed German research award.

She has undertaken very successful interdisciplinary collaborations with psychologists, pedagogues, medical scientists and media artists that have resulted in several award-winning multimodal user interfaces, among them pedagogically well-grounded and empirically validated learning environments for children and young people. Drawing on the concept of computer-based role play with virtual characters, she has promoted a novel form of experience-based learning, for example, to help children and young people cope with bullying at school, develop intercultural sensitivity or master socially challenging situations, such as job interviews.

Elisabeth André has served as a General and Program Co-Chair of major ACM SIGCHI conferences including ACM International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces (IUI) and ACM International Conference on Multimodal Interfaces (ICMI). She has given invited keynotes at top tier scientific conferences, such as International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence – Pacific – Rim International Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-PRICAI) or IEEE International Symposium on Robotics and Human Interactive Communications (RO-MAN) back in 2014.

Elisabeth André has been elected a member of the prestigious Academy of Europe, the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina, and AcademiaNet. To honor her achievements in bringing Artificial Intelligence techniques to HCI, she was awarded a EurAI fellowship (European Coordinating Committee for Artificial Intelligence) that recognizes “individuals who have made significant, sustained contributions to the field of artificial intelligence (AI) in Europe”.