Dr.-Ing. Zhao Ren is a Senior Researcher at the Cognitive Systems Lab, University of Bremen, Germany. Before this, she received her doctoral degree from University of Augsburg, Germany, in 2022, and worked as a Research Associate in L3S Research Center, Leibniz University Hannover, Germany.

Her research interests mainly lie in affective computing, computational paralinguistics, silent paralinguistics, and digital health. She has (co-)authored 70+ publications in peer-reviewed book chapters, journals, and conference proceedings, which have received 3k+ citations (h-index 27). She serves as a Guest Editor in IEEE JBHI, Cyborg and Bionic Systems, and multiple Frontiers journals. She is an Associate Editor of Frontiers in Digital Health, and chaired sessions in ICASSP and EMBC.

Research Topics

Sensing (Health Monitoring)

• Mental and Cognitive Health: Analyzing speech to assess emotional states, cognitive disorders, and physiological markers of health, as well as hate speech.
• Physiological Health: Using advanced signal processing to decode sounds from the cardiovascular and pulmonary systems for early diagnostic screening.
• Intelligent Systems: Acoustic monitoring for industrial safety and robust environmental sensing.

Understanding (Trustworthiness)

• Reliability: Ensuring that emotional AI systems remain robust against interference and consistent across different users and environments.
• Privacy: Pioneering methodologies that protect sensitive emotional speech data and respect individual privacy rights in digital health interactions.
• Transparency: Moving from “black-box” models to explainable AI that provides clear reasoning for its predictions.

Empowering (Human Communication)

• Silent Speech Interfaces: Developing alternative communication channels that translate silent muscle signals into high-quality, intelligible speech.
• Natural Human Expression: Synthesizing voices that are not just accurate, but also carry the natural paralinguistic and emotional richness of human speech.

My Philosophy

In research, as in life, the path is not always smooth sailing. But our greatest work comes not from avoiding falls, but from loving the mountain we choose to climb.

“My formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati: that one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. Not merely bear what is necessary, still less conceal it - all idealism is mendaciousness in the face of what is necessary - but love it.”

Original German: “Meine Formel für die Größe am Menschen ist amor fati: dass man Nichts anders haben will, vorwärts nicht, rückwärts nicht, in alle Ewigkeit nicht. Das Nothwendige nicht bloss ertragen, noch weniger verhehlen - aller Idealismus ist Verlogenheit vor dem Nothwendigen -, sondern es lieben.”

— Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce homo: Wie man wird, was man ist, §10