Anton Batliner received his M.A. degree in Scandinavian Languages in 1973 and his doctoral degree in Phonetics in 1978, both at LMU Munich. He has been a member of the research staff of the Institute for Pattern Recognition at FAU Erlangen since 1997. He is co-editor of one book and author/co-author of more than 200 technical articles, with a current H-index of 29 and more than 3000 citations. His  research interests are the modelling and automatic recognition of emotional user states, all aspects of prosody and paralinguistics in speech processing, uni- and multi-modal focus of attention, pronunciation assessment, and spontaneous speech phenomena such as disfluencies, irregular phonation, etc. He served as Workshop/Session (co)-organizer for Emotional Corpora I, II, III (LREC 2006/2008/2010)), Paralinguistics (ICPhS 07), Non-prototypical Emotions (ACCI 09), Emotion Challenge (INTERSPEECH 2009), Paralinguistic Challenge (INTERSPEECH 2010), Computer Aided Pronunciation Training (Prosody 2010), and Speaker State Challenge (Interspeech 2011); he was guest editor for AHCI, Computer Speech and Language, and Speech Communication, and is Associated Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing as well as reviewer for numerous leading journals and conferences.