PeopleofSuperintelligence

Researcher

Florian Eyben

Florian Eyben is a speech and audio AI researcher whose work includes openSMILE, a toolkit for speech and music feature extraction. At TUM, he developed openSMILE and completed a 2015 dissertation on real-time speech and music classification. He became audEERING’s CTO and co-founder in 2013, then coauthored a 2025 emotional-speech dataset and an August 2026 study of seafarers’ wellbeing. In December 2025, he served as Head of AI Foundation Models and Speech Technology at Agile Robots. As of October 2026, he is CTO and co-founder of audEERING.

Now at
audEERING
Works
251
Citations
16,270
h-index
51
Badges

Publication numbers from OpenAlex, as of 22 October 2026.

Timeline

  1. 2008

    Starting openSMILE at TUM

    In 2008, he develops openSMILE at the Technical University of Munich with Martin Wöllmer and Björn Schuller.

  2. 2010

    Publishing the openSMILE paper

    In 2010, he coauthors the openSMILE paper, which combines feature-extraction algorithms from speech processing and music information retrieval.

  3. 2012–2013

    Co-founding audEERING

    In 2012, audEERING is founded. Since 2013, Eyben serves as its CTO and co-founder, developing software for intelligent audio analysis.

  4. 2015

    A doctorate in audio classification

    He completes a doctorate at TUM in 2015 with a dissertation on real-time speech and music classification. The thesis defines standard acoustic feature sets in an open-source, real-time analysis framework.

  5. 2025

    Expanding the Berlin EmoDB

    He coauthors EmoDB 2.0 in 2025, adding ambiguous samples, glottograms and a naturalness label to the Berlin Database of Emotional Speech.

  6. December 2025

    Head of AI at Agile Robots

    In December 2025, he serves as Head of AI Foundation Models and Speech Technology at Agile Robots. He describes using Google Cloud’s Cluster Director to run containerized AI training workloads.

  7. August 2026

    Monitoring wellbeing at sea

    In August 2026, he coauthors a study of active and passive speech monitoring for seafarers’ mental wellbeing. It analyses speech features and self-reported wellbeing, then predicts emotional expression from passive data.

  8. As of October 2026

    CTO at audEERING

    As of October 2026, he is CTO and co-founder of audEERING.

Career

  1. Since 2012audEERINGCo-founder, CTO
  2. From 2025Agile RobotsHead of AI Foundation Models and Speech Technology

Education

  1. 2015Technical University of MunichDoctorate

From the biography and OpenAlex affiliations (the years of papers that list the organization), so some years are approximate.

  1. 11% of AI doctorate holders from 2010 to 2016 founded or led a company or lab by 10 years after graduationIncludes Florian Eyben. We estimate how often AI doctorate holders founded or led a company or lab by 10 years after graduation, how waiting times compare between founders and top jobs, and which universities trained the most.
  2. The company share of AI researchers’ top papers was 31% in 2020–2024 and 8% in 1970–1974Includes Technical University of Munich. We estimate where the people shaping AI worked when their most-cited papers appeared: the company share was 31% in 2020–2024 and 8% in 1970–1974, and Google led all organizations in 2020–2024.
  3. Google has the highest combined h-index among AI organizationsIncludes Technical University of Munich. We estimate that Google holds the highest combined h-index at 8,016, while universities account for 73% of the deduplicated total across AI organizations.
  4. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology trained or employed 44 of the 187 AI major-prize winners, more than any other universityIncludes Technical University of Munich. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology trained or employed 44 of the 187 AI major-prize winners, more than any other university. We compare doctorate and 5+ year employment links, career timing and current workplaces for 187 major-prize and 1,111 best-paper winners.

Colleagues

People with dated positions at the same organization in the same years.

Sources and credits

Photo: We have no published photo of Florian Eyben yet. Send us a free-licensed photo.

  1. openSMILE: Audio Fingerprinting and Feature Extraction audeering.com. Checked 21 October 2026.
  2. OpenSMILE - The Munich versatile and fast open-source audio feature extractor portal.fis.tum.de. Checked 21 October 2026.
  3. Team - audEERING audeering.com. Checked 21 October 2026.
  4. Dr. Florian Eyben - audEERING audeering.com. Checked 21 October 2026.
  5. Doctor's Theses - Chair of Human-Machine Communication ce.cit.tum.de. Checked 21 October 2026.
  6. EmoDB 2.0: A Database of Emotional Speech in a World that is not Black or White but Grey portal.fis.tum.de. Checked 21 October 2026.
  7. Cluster Director is now generally available | Google Cloud Blog cloud.google.com. Checked 21 October 2026.
  8. Mental Wellbeing at Sea: Active and Passive Speech Monitoring in a Maritime Setting portal.fis.tum.de. Checked 21 October 2026.