Philipp Müller starts as Cyber Valley Max Planck Independent Research Group Leader

Stuttgart – Philipp Müller started his Cyber Valley Max Planck Independent Research Group " Embodied Social Interaction" on November 1, 2025.

Philipp’s current research aims to establish the foundations for the next generation of embodied AI systems that can integrate seamlessly into human social life. To achieve this, he develops methods for analyzing and responding to complex, multimodal human behaviors – for instance, inferring user engagement, emotional expressions, and emotion regulation. He is also interested in understanding how humans perceive and react to robotic systems, with the goal of developing more effective and equitable approaches to human–robot interaction.

Philipp’s research is inherently interdisciplinary, combining theories and methodologies from psychology with multimodal artificial intelligence. A key application area of his work is psychiatry, where he focuses on creating tools to assist clinicians in diagnostic decision-making and in assessing the quality of patient–therapist relationships.

Philipp received a Bachelor's degree in Psychology as well as Bachelor's and Master's degrees in Computer Science from Saarland University. After staying as a Visiting Student Researcher at Stanford University, he conducted his Ph.D. research at the MPI for Informatics. Subsequently, he worked at the University of Stuttgart and has been a Senior Researcher at the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) in Saarbrücken until recently.