Stefan Steidl of FAU Erlangen-Nuremberg in Germany organised ten consecutive Interspeech Challenges with us since the first edition in 2009 – the Interspeech 2009 Emotion Challenge.
He unexpectedly passed away at young age in October 2018.
His contributions to the Computational Paralinguistics ChallengE (ComParE) series and to the field of Computational Paralinguistics, such as to the famous FAU Aibo Emotion Corpus collected by him, Anton Batliner, and Christian Hacker, will be remembered as milestones. His love of and dedication to detail will further remain unrivalled.
In his honour and memory, the ComParE awards shall be named as the Stefan Steidl Computational Paralinguistics Awards from 2019 onwards.
Stefan, we will truly miss you – as friend, colleague, and scientist.