Elmar Nöth obtained his `Diplom' in Computer Science and his doctoral degree at the University of FAU Erlangen-Nuremberg in 1985 and 1990, respectively. From 1985 to 1990 he was a member of the research staff of the Institute for Pattern Recognition (Lehrstuhl für Mustererkennung), working on the use of prosodic information in automatic speech understanding. Since 1990 he is an assistant professor at the same institute and head of the speech group. He is one of the founders of the Sympalog company, which markets conversational dialogue systems.