News

As part of Girls' Day 2026, doctoral students from the human-centered systems lab offered a workshop for schoolgirls. In the workshop, they learned how to recognize human emotions using biosignals capturing human activity such as heart or gaze activity on the basis of sensor technologies. Following a human-centered design process, the schoolgirls worked together in teams to explore the context of use, articulate user  needs and requirements, create a prototypical emotion-adaptive app and evaluate it with users.

Electronic Markets accepted the paper “Biosignal-Adaptive Platforms” co-authored by Mario Nadj, Alexander Maedche, Rene Riedl, Julia Seitz, and Tanja Schulz as a Fundamentals contribution for publication. 

Personalization is a well-established concept that leverages a wide range of user data to tailor digital platforms to target audiences. Advances in sensor technologies now allow continuous recording of human activities. The resulting biosignals can be processed and interpreted in real time enabling closed-loop adaptation and deeper individualized personalization.

Luke Shi Liu successfully defended his PhD thesis titled “Designing Gaze-Adaptive Immersive Learning Support“ on April 23rd, 2026. His work contributes to the fields of Human-Computer Interaction and Education Technologies by a conceptual framework for mixed reality system design in higher education, empirical insights on improving learner’s attention and learning outcomes through gaze-adaptive support, and set of innovative artifacts for cross-device and gaze-adaptive support in immersive learning. 

The Institute for Information Systems (WIN) will be represented with 10 full papers at the 34th European Conference on Information Systems (ECIS), which will take place in June in Milan (Italy) in 2026.  
Beyond the full paper track, WIN researchers are also active in additional conference formats that provide dedicated spaces for emerging research (TREO) and support early-stage and early-career scholars through the doctoral consortium and the junior faculty consortium. 
Congratulations to all participating researchers from WIN! 

Karlsruhe’s Mayor, Gabriele Luczak-Schwarz, is calling on people in and around Karlsruhe to sign up for the citizen panel “Wir forschen digital”: “Wir forschen digital is a great way to get involved in research without any barriers. Give it a try—whether you’d like to participate once a year or on a regular basis. Every contribution matters.” With “Wir forschen digital”, you can participate in studies on digital technologies and experience current research firsthand. After registering on the online portal, you’ll receive regular invitations to exciting studies: You can participate on your own schedule. 

As the opening event of this year's ANYMOS KI:NO summer series, we cordially invite you in collaboration with Triangel to the Kinemathek Karlsruhe on April 23rd at 7 pm, where we will immerse ourselves in the dystopian vision of "Blade Runner 2049." This science fiction film, with its breathtaking visuals, atmospheric music, and captivating story, once again raises questions about artificial intelligence, identity, and humanity.

We welcome Maria Rothvoss Buchheimer as a new team member and doctoral researcher at the Institute for Information Systems (WIN) as part of the human-centered systems lab (h-lab). Maria gained broad and hands-on experience in project management, immersive technologies and user experience through her previous professional roles at AMERIA AG and Siemens AG. Maria holds a Master of Science degree in Digital Management & Transformation and a Bachelor of Science degree in Applied Computer Science.

Mental health disorders affect a significant share of the global population. Meeting the resulting demand for care is a challenge on two fronts: patients face long waiting times and limited access to support, while mental health practitioners work under significant time pressure with processes that are often still manual and fragmented. Two developments in AI offer complementary responses: AI-based process digitalization can make clinical and therapeutic workflows more efficient for practitioners, while conversational AI agents can extend therapeutic support directly to those who need it. 

Can we promote sustainable conversational shopping through system prompting large language models? 

In the “ManyPrompts” project we invite research teams from around the world to design theoretically grounded sustainable shopping system prompts. This project aims to collate a diverse range of experimental designs from the academic community from different disciplines to execute up to 40 distinct experimental designs via the online platform Prolific involving approx. 16.000 participants. We will analyze the variation in design choices, outcome measures, and effects and synthesize findings into a paper, crediting co-authorship to all participating researchers whose system prompt designs were implemented.

As AI tools take on an increasing number of everyday work tasks, understanding how they reshape roles, collaboration, and organizational structures becomes more important than ever. From March 17 to 21, 2026, the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) invites the public to explore these questions at its “Human x AI” Knowledge Week at the TRIANGEL, located at Kronenplatz in Karlsruhe. The program features expert talks, discussions, hands-on workshops, and interactive experiences that offer insights into how humans and AI can work together in the future. The Knowledge Week is co-organized by the Institute for Information Systems (WIN) and the project MenschKI!.

The Journal of the Association for Information Systems (JAIS) has accepted the paper “Increasing Label Quality with Interactive Image Labeling Systems: An Explanatory Design Theory” co-authored by Stefan Morana, Jasper Feine, and Alexander Maedche for publication. Drawing on the theory of interactive media effects, we performed a comprehensive design science research project following the design explanatory design theory genre: We derived design requirements and design principles for interactive image labeling systems that support interactivity-based improvements in label quality. We evaluated our proposed design in two evaluation episodes and demonstrated its positive impact on label quality in a real-world context with crowd workers.

Research of the Institute for Information Systems (WIN) is represented by 5 full papers, 3 posters and 2 workshops at the ACM CHI conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, the leading international conference on Human-Computer Interaction (HCI).  CHI 2026 will take place in Barcelona from April 13th to 17th, 2026. Many of the presented works at CHI 2026 are closely linked to the DFG-funded Research Training Group KD2School, which focuses on processing biosignals continuously emitted by human beings using state-of-the-art sensor technology and on this basis designing biosignal-adaptive systems in which humans and information technologies continuously co-adapt to each other.