Sven Wachsmuth received the Diploma and Ph.D. degree in computer science from Bielefeld University, Germany, in 1997 and 2001. He did his habilitation in 2009 in the area of applied computer science.

In 1997 he joined the Applied Informatics Group (Angewandte Informatik) at the Faculty of Technology, Bielefeld University. From 1997 to 2000 he worked within the collaborative research centre 360 "Situated Artificial Communicators".

Since 2001, he holds a faculty staff position at Bielefeld University, first as a senior researcher (akad. Rat) in the Applied Computer Science Group, then (since 2009) as a lecturer (akad. Oberrat). He was announced as the head of the central lab facilities of the Excellence Cluster 277 "Cognitive Interaction Technology" in 2008.

In Nov 2002, he took a sabbatical year supported by the German Research Foundation (DFG) at the Computer Science Department of the University of Toronto as a host of Prof. Sven Dickinson. In 2002 and 2004-2005, he worked as a technical coordinator of the EC funded FP5 project "Visual Active Memory Processes and Interactive REtrieval" (VAMPIRE). Between 2006 and 2014, he was principle investigator in the special research centre 673 "Alignment in Communication" (A4, C1) and the Research Institute for Cognition and Robotics (CoR-Lab). Within the Excellence Cluster 277, he coordinated several research projects in the areas of task assistance for persons with cognitive disabilities (TAPeD, 2008-13), action selection based on multi-modal anchoring (ANCHOR, 2008-11), cognitive service robotics (CSRA, 2013-17), and familiarization in cooperative manual action (FAMULA, 2013-17). Between 2013 and 2018, he further worked as a principle investigator on a Virtual Reality coaching space in the CITEC project ICSPACE (2013-2017), on assisted living environments in the BMBF project KogniHome (2014-17), and on Augmented Reality based task assistance for disabled people in the BMBF project ADAMAAS (2015-18).

His research interests include human-robot interaction, scene understanding for robot vision, linking computer vision and language, service robotics, cognitive assistance as well as system integration and evaluation. In the last years, a special emphasis has been on reproducible experimentation in robotics. He has published various papers in these fields and has organized several international workshops (ICCV-Workshop on Integration of Speech and Image Understanding, 1999; Workshop on Benchmarking and Evaluation of Interactive Cognitive Systems, 2011; IROS-Workshop on shared autonomy, 2016; ICMI-Workshop on embodied interaction with smart environments; 2016). He has been a member of the RoboCup@Home organization committees or technical committees 2010-2012. Since 2013, he is member of the executive committee of RoboCup@Home and has been a local chair of the RoboCup@Home league 2016 in Leipzig. He further joined the local organizing committee of the RoboCup German Open in 2015 and is the local @Home chair in 2017.

Sven Wachsmuth is member of IEEE Computer Society and Gesellschaft für Informatik.