Benjamin Weiss

Born 1977 in Bonn/Germany.

Benjamin Weiss lives and works as Senior Researcher in Berlin/Germany. He studied communication science & phonetics, educational studies and Scandinavian studies at the universities of Bonn, Trondheim and Berlin. After his graduation in 2002, he was with the Linguistics department at Humboldt University Berlin as fellow of a Graduiertenkolleg, obtaining his Ph.D. with a thesis on speech tempo and pronunciation. In 2007, he joined the Quality and Usability Lab of TU Berlin, working on a variety of topics, like perceived speech transmission quality for time-varying channels such as mobile and IP-based networks, multimodal Human-Computer Interaction, HCI (with a focus on user group differences and factors affecting perceived usability), and interpersonal likability inferred from voices and speech interactions. As Visiting Fellow at the MARCS Auditory Laboratories, University of Western Sydney, Australia, he studied embodied conversational agents in September 2008, as well as perceptual dimension of voices in the first quarter of 2014. His research centers on the users’ perspective and consequently on improving systems and interfaces by gaining insights in the relation between system features and user experience, but also by developing new evaluation methods. 

Benjamin regularly teaches multimodal interaction and speech dialog systems. He was also part of the organizing committees of Interspeech 2015 in Dresden and CASA 2013 in Edinburgh, and he acts as reviewer for multiple scientific conferences and journals in speech communication and HCI. He has received multiple grants and two best paper awards.

Benjamin Weiss is a fellow in cooperation with Hybrid Plattform in Berlin.