Prof. Yoshiharu Yamamoto is a Professor at the Educational Physiology Laboratory, Graduate School of Education, the University of Tokyo, where he is teaching and researching physiological bases and data analytics in various fields of health sciences. His current research interests include biomedical signal processing, nonlinear and statistical bio-dynamics, and health informatics. He has published >190 full refereed journal papers and >90 refereed conference proceedings and correspondence in the English language (Google Scholar h-index: 65), and is currently an associate editor of IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering and an editorial board member of Biomedical Physics & Engineering Express.

Prof. Björn W. Schuller is a Professor of Artificial Intelligence at the Imperial College London, UK, where he heads GLAM - the Group on Language, Audio, and Music, Full Professor at TUM, Germany, Guest Professor at HIT, China, and founding CEO and current CSO of audEERING, Germany known for audio-based sentiment and emotion analysis. Prof. Schuller (co-)authored more than 1,500 publications leading to >68,000 citations (h-index: 115). He is Field Chief Editor of Frontiers in Digital Health, Editor in Chief of AI Open Journal, and he was Editor in Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing. He served as General Chair for ACII 2019, ACII Asia 2018, and ICMI 2014, Program Chair of Interspeech 2019, ACM ICMI 2019, 2013, ACII 2015, 2011, and IEEE SocialCom 2012, and initiated and co-organised >40 international challenges, including the annual ComParE challenge series from 2009 to 2023, the annual Audio/Visual Emotion Challenge and Workshop (AVEC) series from 2011 to 2019, and the annual Multimodal Sentiment Analysis Challenge (MuSe) since 2020. He is Fellow of the ISCA, Fellow of the ACM, President-Emeritus and Fellow of the AAAC, Fellow of the IEEE, Fellow of the BCS, Fellow of DIRDI, and Fellow of ELLIS.

Prof. Toru Takumi received his doctoral degree from Graduate School of Medicine, Kyoto University. Then he began research on psychiatric disorders as a PI at the Osaka Bioscience Institute. Afterwards, he served as a professor at School of Medicine, Hiroshima University and a senior team leader at the RIKEN Center for Brain Science. In 2019, he started a professorship at School of Medicine and Graduate School of Medicine, Kobe University. In 2021, he became the vice dean for research, as well as the director of Center for Medical Transformation and the Mental Disorders Research Center at Graduate School of Medicine, Kobe University. He has been working on autism spectrum disorders (ASD) and neuropsychiatric diseases research, using multidisciplinary approaches, from molecules through circuits to behaviour, and produced an artificial founder mouse for forward genetics of ASD (Nakatani, et al., Cell 137: 1235, 2009; Nakai, et al., Sci. Adv. 3: e1603001 2017), of which the data are used in this challenge.

Zijiang Yang received his Master's degree in Information Technology from University of York, UK, in 2016. He is currently a Project Researcher in Educational Physiology Laboratory at the University of Tokyo, Japan. Meanwhile, he is also a PhD Candidate at University of Augsburg, Germany. His research focuses on Emotional Text-to-Speech, Emotional Voice Conversion and Affective Computing. He has more than 450 citations on Google Scholar and published two papers in INTERSPEECH 2020 and 2022.

Lukas Christ is currently a senior PhD Candidate at the Chair of Health Informatics at the Technical University of Munich, Germany. His main research interests lie in emotion recognition and sentiment analysis. He was a co-organiser of the Multimodal Sentiment Analysis Challenge (MuSe) held at ACM Multimedia in 2022, 2023, and 2024.

Meishu Song received her Master's degree in Human-Computer Interaction Technology from University of York, UK. She is currently a senior PhD Candidate and teaching assistant at the University of Tokyo. Her main interests in research are in Multi-task Multi-modal Learning, Digital Health, and Affective Computing. She has 12 first-author peer-reviewed papers published, and more than 300 citations on Google Scholar.