Christian A. Müller

Principal Researcher and DFKI Research Fellow Dr. Christian Müller began working in automotive in 2007 when getting in contact with Silicon Valley OEM think tanks during his postdoc in Berkeley, Ca. Before, in the period of 1999 to 2006, his research in machine learning with Bayesian uncertainty handling, has been applied in the telecommunication industry (speech-based classification including age and gender recognition, emotion and stress classification). Back at DFKI, he built up the automotive Intelligent User Interfaces group, gaining international recognition for inter alia the first eye-gaze controls in the car and early contributions to gesture recognition systems. He has been leading a number of national and European projects including Connected Car projects in cooperation with BMW, Volkswagen, Daimler, Continental, Bosch, Ford, Opel, and others. In 2012 he was appointed DFKI Research Fellow. From 2012 to 2014 Christian Müller was Action Line Leader for Intelligent Mobility with the European Knowledge and Innovation Community EIT Digital with partners from across Europe. He is considered the father of OpenDS, the world's most popular open source driving simulator, which is now applied for training and testing driving automation functions. In 2017, Christian Müller became Head of the Competence Center for Autonomous Driving (CCAD) that spans across all DFKI departments. In 2018, he became Deputy head of DFKI department Agents and Simulated Reality where he also leads the research team Autonomous Driving. Since 2019, Dr. Müller leads the research and engineering “Think Tank” iMotion Germany with a fast growing number of PhD students in the areas of robust and explainable AI for environment perception and trajectory planning of self-driving cars. Here, he is responsible for spearhead AI technology as part of sensor-based environment perception, trajectory planning, and more general safe on-road behavior of artificial drivers