About me
Prof. Dr. Christian Werner Becker-Asano
Christian Becker-Asano received his doctor's degree (Dr. rer. nat.) from the University of Bielefeld in 2008, for his work on affect simulation for agents with believable interactivity (WASABI architecture), which he applied to the articulated communicator Max, a virtual human that he designed as a student.
He was a Pre-Doctoral Fellow of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) during a three month visit in 2005 at the National Institute of Informatics, Tokyo, with the support of Prof. Helmut Prendinger.
From 2008 to 2010 he applied his experience in Affective Computing to the humanoid robots and androids of the Intelligent Robotics and Communication Labs at ATR in Kyoto, Japan, supported by Prof. Hiroshi Ishiguro as a post-doctoral fellow of JSPS and Alexander von Humboldt (AvH) foundation. A return fellowship of the AvH foundation allowed him to join the Interdisciplinary Research Group "Coping with Emergencies" as an affiliated Junior Fellow at the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies (FRIAS) from 2010 to 2011. From 2012 to May 2015, he held the position of a Lecturer (akad. Rat. auf Zeit) in the Research Group on the Foundations of AI, where he applied WASABI to different robotic systems.
In June 2015 he became independent research scientist at Bosch R&D in Renningen (Stuttgart) and from March 2018 until February 2020 he was Product Owner of Intralogistic Robotics leading a dedicated team of roboticists at the Grow platform GmbH in Ludwigsburg.
Since March 2020 he is full professor for "Artificial Intelligence and Human-Machine Interaction" at Stuttgart Media University in Stuttgart, Germany. He founded the "Humanoid Lab" at the University's Institute for Applied Artificial Intelligence in 2021, which became the home of the first German, custom designed android robot "Andrea".
In 2024, he was visiting researcher in the Sugano lab at Tokyo University, Japan, supported by a fellowship of the Alexander von Humboldt foundation.
He was the co-founder and CTO of Dejita Consulting GbR from 2020 until 2024.
His research interests include (but are not limited to): Social Robotics, Affective Computing, Theory of mind reasoning, Social signal processing and integration, Empirical evaluation of robots in the wild.