Prof. Dr. Clemens Stachl

I am currently working as Associate Professor of Behavioral Science and Director of the Institute of Behavioral Science and Technology at the University of St. Gallen, Switzerland.

Before, I held positions as postdoctoral researcher at the Media and Personality Lab (Gabriella Harari) at the Department of Communication at Stanford University and at the Department of Psychology at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (Markus Bühner).

My research is focused on the investigation of human behavior in different contexts, individual differences, and life outcomes by methods from the computational and social sciences. I use machine learning and computational modeling to describe, explain, and predict human behavior and psychological characteristics.

I am interested in how computational methods and AI can be used to improve and facilitate people's lives, how human-computer interaction can be improved by considering individual differences, and what consequences the widespread (and unreflected) use of computational systems can have on individuals and society at large.

I am sometimes active on Twitter 

News & Updates

Keynote at the 17th Biennial Conference of the Society of Differential Psychology, Personality Psychology and Psychological Assessment (DPPD) 

25.09.2023 , Salzburg, AT, EU

Invited Talk at the Center for Social Data Science - SODAS

02.06.2023 , Copenhagen, DK, EU

It was super interesting to present my work at the Copenhagen Center for Social Data Science (SODAS) and to discuss with the team.

Keynote at the 4th Symposium on Big Data and Research Syntheses in Psychology with a special focus on Machine Learning & Open Science

09.05.2023 , Online

I gave my first keynote at this very nice boutique conference in Frankfurt.

Invited Talk at Singapore Agency for Science, Technology, and Research (A*STAR

12.01.2023 , Online

Invited Talk at the University of Zurich

05.12.2022 , Zurich, Switzerland

I am glad that Caroline Strobl and Rudolf Debelak invited me to present my groups work on behavioral sequences at the department of psychology at the University of Zurich.

Invited Talk at the University of Zurich

01.11.2022 , Zurich, Switzerland

I was glad to present my groups work on personality prediction at Wiebke Bleidorn's group at the department of psychology at the University of Zurich.

Invited Talk at the University of Graz

24.10.2022 , Graz, Austria, EU

It was an rewarding experience to give a talk on my work at a lecture hall at my alma mater.

Inaugural Lecture at HSG

04.10.2022 , St. Gallen, Switzerland

Finally, I was able to give an inaugural lecture at the University of St. Gallen (in German). 

Talk at European Conference of Personality (ECP)

15.07.2022, Madrid, Spain, EU

On the last day of ECP20, I presented latest results from our ongoing research project on behavioral sequences and the predictability of digital daily behaviors.

Workshop on Mobile Sensing and Machine Learning at the EAPP Summer School of Personality Science (SSPS)

05.07.2022, Madrid, Spain, EU

I was happy to teach part of the EAPP Summer School on Personality Science together with Gabriella Harari.

Visiting Research Stay at the University of Bergen and talk at the Bergen Future Week at Media City Bergen

15.07.2022, BergenNorway

I was invited to spend a month of my time as a visiting researcher at the University of Bergen, hosted by Marija Slavkovic.

During my time in Bergen, I also had the opportunity to give a very short talk about smartphones and personality traits at Media City Bergen. Such a cool and modern venue in such an old and historic city.

Invited Talk at the Natural Science Museum in Berlin

22.04.2022, Berlin,  Germany, EU  

I was quite an experience to talk about my research in the at the Museum für Naturkunde at Berlin.
The video was created and provided to me by a kind visitor, unfortunately it is very low quality :(.

21.03.2022, Online/Nice, France, EU

I gave a talk on data collection with smartphones – beyond state-of-the-art.

SPSP 2022

19.02.2022, Online/San Francisco, CA, USA

I gave a talk on how daily behaviors can be represented as temporal sequences.

Invited talk at the University of Amsterdam

04.05.2021, Online/Amsterdam, Netherlands, EU

Angelika Stefan invited me to give a guest lecture about my research at the Mellenbergh lecture series at the Psychological Methods Department at the University of Amsterdam.

Invited talk at MediaFutures

20.04.2021, Online/Bergen, NO

Marija Slavkovic invited me to give a talk at the new MediaFutures research center in Bergen, Norway. 

Machine Learning Workshop at the UZH 

29. & 30.03.2021, Online/Zurich, CH

Together with Florian Pargent, I gave the all-new version of our Introduction to Machine Learning in R workshop (featuring the new mlr3) for the OB reading group of Jochen Menges/Lauren Howe, at the University of Zurich.

Invited talk at the Interdisciplinary Center for Educational Research (IZBF)

25.02.2021, Online/Berlin

Matthias Ziegler invited me to give a talk about mobile personality sensing at the IZBF in Berlin, Germany.

SPSP 2021 Convention

14.02.2021, Online

I am exited that I will be giving a talk on talk on explainable machine learning for mobile personality sensing at SPSP pre-conference on the Psychology of Media and Technology.

I will also give another talk on explainable machine learning in the professional development session New Developments in Psychological Assessment and How to Use Them,organized by Sandra Matz (Columbia Business School) and Friedrich Götz (Cambridge University).

Invited talk at the University of Regensburg

17.12.2020, Online/Regensburg, DE, EU

I gave an invited talk on mobile sensing in educational research in the colloquium of Prof. Sven Hilbert, at the University of Regensburg.

Invited talk at the University of Hamburg

15.12.2020, Online/Hamburg, DE, EU

I gave an invited talk on mobile sensing in personality psychology in the colloquium of Prof. Jenny Wagner, at the University of Hamburg.

Machine Learning workshop 

25.08.2020, Online/Zurich, CH

I gave a online short-version of the Introduction to Machine Learning in R workshop (developed by myself and Florian Pargent) at the University of Zurich.

USC - Summer School 

04.08.2020, Online/Santa Barbara, CA, USA

I will be giving a talk on the predictiveness of behavioral smartphone data for personality traits, at the USC - summer school on Sensor-Based Behavioral Machine Learning

Our Research on Personality Prediction from Daily Behavior was published in PNAS

Stachl, C., Au, Q., Schoedel, R., Samuel. D. Gosling, Gabriella. M. Harari., Buschek, D., Völkel, S., Schuwerk, T., . . . Bühner, M. (2020). Predicting Personality from Patterns of Behavior Collected with Smartphones. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS). https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1920484117 

New articles out

Stachl, C., Pargent, F., Hilbert, S., Harari, G. M., Schoedel, R., Vaid, S., … Bühner, M. (2020). Personality Research and Assessment in the Era of Machine Learning. European Journal of Personality, per.2257. https://doi.org/10.1002/per.2257 

Schoedel, R., Pargent, F., Au, Q., Völkel, S. T., Schuwerk, T., Bühner, M., & Stachl, C. (2020). To Challenge the Morning Lark and the Night Owl: Using Smartphone Sensing Data to Investigate Day–Night Behaviour Patterns. European Journal of Personality, per.2258. https://doi.org/10.1002/per.2258 

Völkel, S. T., Schödel, R., Buschek, D., Stachl, C., Winterhalter, V., Bühner, M., & Hussmann, H. (2020). Developing a Personality Model for Speech-based Conversational Agents Using the Psycholexical Approach. Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 1–14. https://doi.org/10.1145/3313831.3376210

Pre-Conference on Personality Dynamics, Processes, and Functioning

27.02.2020, New Orleans, LA, USA

I am organizing a symposium on "Big Data, Machine Learning and Mobile Sensing - New Directions in Personality Research", featuring Ramona Schödel (LMU-Munich, Psychology) and Poruz Khambatta (Stanford Business School). 

December 2019

I am giving a guest lecture on personality sensing with smartphones in the human factors seminar of Ramona Schödel at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München.

Oktober 2019

I will start my new position and will join Gabriella M. Harari's team at the media and personality lab at Stanford University.

30.09.2019 - 02.10.2019

Uni-Saarland, Saarbrücken, Germany.


DPPD 2019, Dresden, Germany

14.09. - 18.09.2019

ECDP 2019

31.08.2019

Presentation at the ECDP Big Data special event in Athens.

Together with Sabine Walper, I will talk about the potential of mobile sensing methods for continous high-frequent data collection in developmental psychology.

06.03.2019

Presentation at the DPPD Post-Doc workshop at the GESIS institute in Mannheim.

I will present results from our teams latest study on the prediction of big five personality traits from a wide range of smartphone-sensed behaviors.

MASS WORKSHOP

05.03.2019

Presentation at the 1st  workshop on mobile apps and sensors in surveys (MASS) at the University of Mannheim.

I will introduce the LMU-PhoneStudy mobile-sensing research system and presents how data from mobiles sensors can be used cojointly with classical measures from surveys.

SPSP 2019

09.02.2019

Presentation at the 2019 SPSP Annual Convention.

I will give a(n) (unfortunately remotely) talk on the predictability of personality traits from every-day smartphone usage in the symposium "Using RealWorld Behavioral Data to Advance Psychological Research and Theory", chaired by  Christine Anderl

14.12.2018

Machine Learning Workshop at the University of Regensburg

Florian Pargent and myself will be giving an introductory machine learning workshop at the University of Regensburg.

Check out our open  materials and data: https://osf.io/mnfbd/ 

26.10.2018

Machine Learning Workshop at the University of Cologne

Florian Pargent and myself will be giving an introductory machine learning workshop at the University of Cologne.

Check out our open  materials and data: https://osf.io/mnfbd/ 

DGPS 2018

16.09. - 20.09.2018

14.09.2018

GESIS - CSS Seminar

Claudia Wagner has invited me  to present my research about mobile sensing at the GESIS CSS seminar for computational social science in Cologne.

24.08. - 27.08.2018

CLC Workshop

Gabriella M. Harari and Samuel D. Gosling have invited me to participate in an initial workshop for the creation of an international mobile sensing consortium in Austin, TX, USA.

ECP 2019

17.07. - 21.07.2018

Together with Sandrine Müller, I'll be chairing a symposium titled "Quantified Personality: Measuring individual differences in behavior with mobile sensing"at the ECP19 in Zadar, Croatia and present my latest work on the prediction of behavior from digital footprints.

APS 2018

25.05.2018

 Sandrine Müller and I be will co-chairing a symposium titled "Physical manifestations of psychological characteristics" at the APS - Convention in San Francisco. I will present my groups work on the prediction of individual personality traits from smartphone data with a focus on geo-location based features. 

22.05.2018

Invited Talk, Stanford University

 Jon Krosnick and Gabriella Harari have invited me to give a talk about mobile sensing research at the communications department of Stanford University.