Joakim Gustafsson

Joakim Gustafsson is a Professor and Head of the Department of Speech, Music and Hearing at KTH Royal Institute of Technology. His research focuses on multimodal systems, conversational speech synthesis, social robots, and interactional analysis of spoken dialogue. He leads VR-funded projects like CONNECTED (context-aware speech synthesis) and STANCE (speaker stance perception), and co-leads CAPTivating (public speaking analysis). He is also involved in EU-funded projects like BabyRobot (social robots for children) and AAIS (robot-assisted elderly care).

Education: PhD in Speech Technology from KTH (2002), supervised by Björn Granström with Julia Hirschberg as faculty opponent. Previously held a Senior Researcher position at Telia Research (2000–2007), where he contributed to projects like NICE (speech-enabled children's game) and T�nkOm (animated agent interactions).

He serves on editorial boards for Speech Communication and International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, and is Treasurer of the ISCA Board. Past roles include Technical Program co-Chair for Interspeech 2017 and Area Chair for multiple Interspeech conferences.

Current initiatives include RAPPORT (improving AAC devices), EmpowerME (LLM-based support for cognitive disabilities), and Food Talk (sustainable cooking via AI assistants). His work spans AI for Good, human-robot collaboration, and context-aware interaction systems.