PeopleofSuperintelligence

Researcher

Patrick Gebhard

Patrick Gebhard is an affective-computing researcher at the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) in Saarbrücken who builds computational models of emotion, trust and social behavior for socially interactive agents. The Affective Computing Group at DFKI has been under Gebhard's lead since 2007, and the 2011 paper "Designing Emotions", co-authored with Michael Kipp and Thomas Dackweiler, extended the ALMA affect simulator with the EMIMOTO tool. Later papers covered EmmA, a social agent for burn-out outpatient treatment (2020), the EMMI project on trust in automated driving (2022), the ReNeLiB listening-behavior toolkit (2024) and a coaching agent for robotic neurorehabilitation (2024). Gebhard is a Research Fellow and Principal Researcher at DFKI, and in December 2025 gave a talk on artificial empathic technology at Ulm University.

Now at
Cognitive Assistants Department
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Timeline

  1. Since 2007

    Heading DFKI's Affective Computing Group

    The Affective Computing Group in the Cognitive Assistants department at the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) in Saarbrücken has Gebhard as its head. Over ten national and European research projects have had Gebhard as full coordinator or work-package lead.

  2. 2011

    Designing Emotions and EMIMOTO

    The journal KI – Künstliche Intelligenz publishes "Designing Emotions" in 2011, co-authored by Gebhard with Michael Kipp and Thomas Dackweiler. The paper proposes enhancing the ALMA (A Layered Model of Affect) affect simulator by learning the parametrization of its OCC emotion model through user studies, and presents the tool EMIMOTO for this purpose.

  3. 2020

    EmmA for burn-out outpatients

    A paper by Gebhard, Tanja Schneeberger, Michael Dietz, Elisabeth André and Nida ul Habib Bajwa appears on arXiv in December 2020 and presents EmmA, a mobile social agent that serves as a vocational reintegration assistant for burn-out outpatient treatment. The agent combines real-time social signal interpretation with a computational simulation of emotion regulation that shapes its social behavior and its choice of verbal treatment strategies.

  4. 2022

    Trust in automated driving

    An April 2022 paper with thirteen authors, among them Gebhard, describes EMMI, a project on empathic human-machine interaction for establishing trust in automated driving. EMMI develops a socio-emotional user model for estimating user trust, together with user-centered interfaces that induce changes in users' trust in automated vehicles.

  5. 2024

    The ReNeLiB listening toolkit

    ReNeLiB, a publicly available toolkit for generating listening behavior of socially interactive agents in real time, appears on arXiv in February 2024 from Daksitha Withanage Don, Philipp Müller, Fabrizio Nunnari, Elisabeth André and Gebhard. It extracts multimodal social cues from the user, generates behavior with a neural network, and animates both FLAME-based and Apple ARKit-based agents.

  6. 2024

    A neurorehabilitation coaching agent

    Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence publishes a nine-author paper in November 2024 with Gebhard of DFKI as last author, written with colleagues at Augsburg University and the National Research Council of Italy. The paper presents an AI-based system for out-of-hospital neurorehabilitation training that pairs a rehabilitation training device with a socially interactive agent acting as virtual coaching assistant, and tests it in a feasibility study with healthy participants.

  7. December 2025

    Research Fellow at DFKI

    The Colloquium Cognitive Systems at Ulm University hosts Gebhard in December 2025 for the talk "Towards Artificial Empathic Technology", which presents a framework that models empathy from emotion recognition through the regulation of emotional states to appropriate expression. Gebhard works on computational models for affect and social behavior and their use in socially interactive agents, as a Research Fellow and Principal Researcher at DFKI in Saarbrücken.

Career

  1. Since 2007Cognitive Assistants DepartmentHead
  2. NowDFKIResearch Fellow and Principal Researcher

From the biography.

  1. Nonprofit roles are 2.3 times as common in AI safetyIncludes DFKI. We estimate where people focused on safety, alignment and evaluation work. Nonprofit roles appear for 25.1% of safety people with known affiliations, compared with 11.0% in other areas.
  2. The top 10 organizations employed 22% of people shaping AI in 2025: 51% of company researchers and 21% of university researchersIncludes DFKI. We estimate the share of people shaping AI who worked at the top 10 organizations each year from 1955 to 2025, comparing concentration across companies, universities, and institutes and labs.
  3. The United States employs an estimated 48% of people shaping AIIncludes DFKI. We estimate where the people shaping AI work today, how universities, companies and research institutes split across countries, and how country shares have changed since the 1960s.
  4. More people shaping AI studied at Massachusetts Institute of Technology than at any other institutionIncludes DFKI. We estimate where the people shaping AI studied and where their careers led. Massachusetts Institute of Technology leads with 467 former students, including 291 recorded doctorates.

Colleagues

People named in this biography, and people with dated positions at the same organization in the same years.

Sources and credits

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  1. Gebhard Patrick - Mind Bot mindbot.eu. Checked 22 October 2026.
  2. 11.12.2025 - Dr. Patrick Gebhard (DFKI) - Universität Ulm uni-ulm.de. Checked 22 October 2026.
  3. Designing Emotions dl.gi.de. Checked 22 October 2026.
  4. Designing a Mobile Social and Vocational Reintegration Assistant for Burn-out Outpatient Treatment arxiv.org. Checked 22 October 2026.
  5. EMMI: Empathic Human-Machine Interaction for Establishing Trust in Automated Driving arxiv.org. Checked 22 October 2026.
  6. ReNeLiB: Real-time Neural Listening Behavior Generation for Socially Interactive Agents arxiv.org. Checked 22 October 2026.
  7. Socially interactive agents for robotic neurorehabilitation training: conceptualization and proof-of-concept study ncbi.nlm.nih.gov. Checked 22 October 2026.