PD Dr.-Ing. Sven Wachsmuth

Sven Wachsmuth received the Diploma and Ph.D. degree in computer science from Bielefeld University, Germany, in 1997 and 2001. He did his habilitation in 2009 in the area of applied computer science.

In 1997 he joined the Applied Informatics Group (Angewandte Informatik) at the Faculty of Technology, Bielefeld University. From 1997 to 2000 he worked within the collaborative research centre 360 "Situated Artificial Communicators".

Since 2001, he holds a faculty staff position at Bielefeld University, first as a senior researcher (akad. Rat) in the Applied Computer Science Group, then (since 2009) as a lecturer (akad. Oberrat). In 2008, he was announced as the head of the central lab facilities of the Excellence Cluster 277 "Cognitive Interaction Technology". Since 2023, he is Managing Director of the COSY@Home-Lab in the central academic institute CITEC (Center for Cognitive Interaction Technology).

In Nov 2002, he took a sabbatical year supported by the German Research Foundation (DFG) at the Computer Science Department of the University of Toronto as a host of Prof. Sven Dickinson. In 2002 and 2004-2005, he worked as a technical coordinator of the EC funded FP5 project "Visual Active Memory Processes and Interactive REtrieval" (VAMPIRE). Between 2006 and 2014, he was principle investigator in the special research centre 673 "Alignment in Communication" (A4, C1) and the Research Institute for Cognition and Robotics (CoR-Lab). Within the Excellence Cluster 277, he coordinated several research projects in the areas of task assistance for persons with cognitive disabilities (TAPeD, 2008-13), action selection based on multi-modal anchoring (ANCHOR, 2008-11), cognitive service robotics (CSRA, 2013-17), and familiarization in cooperative manual action (FAMULA, 2013-17). Between 2014 and 2023, he further worked as a principle investigator on assisted living environments in the BMBF project KogniHome (2014-17) and the industry-funded project HanKA (2018-23), as well as on Augmented Reality based task assistance for disabled people in the BMBF project ADAMAAS (2015-18). In the area of cognitive service robotics, he headed an industry-funded project CUPRO (2018-2021), leads the DFG project SEMIAC (2022-2025) and coordinates the it's OWL innovation project 'Hybrid-Living' (2023-2026).

His research interests include human-robot interaction, scene understanding for robot vision, linking computer vision and language, service robotics, cognitive assistance as well as system integration and evaluation. A further emphasis has been on reproducible experimentation in robotics. He has published various papers in these fields and has organized several international workshops (ICCV-Workshop on Integration of Speech and Image Understanding, 1999; Workshop on Benchmarking and Evaluation of Interactive Cognitive Systems, 2011; IROS-Workshop on shared autonomy, 2016; ICMI-Workshop on embodied interaction with smart environments; 2016). He has been a member of the RoboCup@Home organization committees or technical committees 2010-2012. From 2013 to 2019, he was member of the executive committee of RoboCup@Home and was local chair of the RoboCup@Home league 2016 in Leipzig. He further joined the local organizing committee of the RoboCup German Open in 2015 and is heading the @Home LOC since 2017.

Sven Wachsmuth is member of IEEE Computer Society and Gesellschaft für Informatik.