Gerhard Rigoll

Timeline

1. 1976–1982

   Technical cybernetics at Stuttgart

   He studies technical cybernetics at the University of Stuttgart and earns his diploma in 1982.

2. 1982–1986

   Speech and AI at Fraunhofer

   He joins Fraunhofer's Department of Advanced Information and Communication Technologies in Stuttgart as a research assistant in 1982 and works on digital speech processing, speech synthesis, speech recognition and artificial intelligence through 1986. He earns a doctorate in automatic speech recognition at Stuttgart in 1986.

3. 1986–1993

   IBM and NTT research

   He holds an IBM postdoctoral fellowship at IBM Thomas Watson Research Center's Continuous Speech Recognition Group from 1986 to 1988. At NTT Human Interface Laboratories in Tokyo, he works on neurocomputing, speech recognition and pattern recognition as a visiting scientist from 1991 to 1993.

4. 1993–2001

   Professor in Duisburg

   He becomes professor of computer engineering at Gerhard Mercator University in Duisburg in 1993 and holds the post through 2001.

5. 1994

   Mutual-information speech recognition

   In 1994, he proposes a hybrid connectionist-HMM speech recognizer that uses an unsupervised neural network as a vector quantizer; the paper reports a 25% error reduction against an HMM using a standard k-means vector quantizer.

6. 2002

   Human-machine communication at TUM

   He joins TUM as a full professor of human-machine communication in 2002, moving from the computer-engineering professorship in Duisburg.

7. 2013–2019

   Gait recognition and an IEEE Fellowship

   At ICASSP 2013, he coauthors a gait-based person-identification paper with Jürgen T. Geiger, Martin Hofmann and Björn Schuller. In 2014, he coauthors an acoustic gait-identification system with Jürgen T. Geiger, Maximilian Kneißl and Björn Schuller, using cepstral features and hidden Markov models on the TUM GAID database. In 2019, he becomes an IEEE Fellow for contributions to multimodal human-machine communication.

8. As of October 2026

   Professor emeritus at TUM

   He is professor emeritus of human-machine communication at TUM. In 2026, he coauthors a paper on cooperative fusion of future trajectory predictions across infrastructure and vehicles.