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Moritz Langner successfully defended his PhD thesis titled “Gaze-adaptive LLM-based Reading and Writing Assistants“ on March 10th 2025. His work contributes to the human-computer interaction body of knowledge by providing empirical evidence on the feasibility of eye-based cognitive state recognition and designing gaze-adaptive LLM-based assistants. The thesis project was carried in association with the DFG-funded KD2School (https://kd2school.info/) 

The Institute for Information Systems (WIN) will be present with four full papers and three late-breaking work papers at the ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. CHI is the premier international conference of Human-Computer Interaction and will be held from April 26th to May 1st in Yokohama, Japan (https://chi2025.acm.org/). 

Burnout, depression, anxiety disorders - more and more people suffer from mental illness. Because access to psychotherapy is limited, some are turning to artificial intelligence (AI) systems. Chatbots show great potential. But does the technology lack the necessary empathy?  

In a recent podcast of Deutschlandfunk Florian Onur Kuhlmeier talks about our research at the human-centered systems lab (h-lab). 

The International Journal of Human-Computer Studies has published the paper "AF-Mix: A gaze-aware learning system with attention feedback in mixed reality" for publication. The paper is co-authored by Shi Liu, Peyman Toreini, and Alexander Maedche. 

The Einstein Center Digital Future (ECDF) is an interdisciplinary project of Technische Universität Berlin, Charité Berlin, Freie Universität Berlin, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and Universität der Künste Berlin. Effective January 20th, the new scientific advisory board started its work, The Scientific Advisory Board of ECDF has the task of advising on the development of medium and long-term goals, promoting cooperation with other research institutions, and making strategic recommendations to the Executive Board. It regularly comments on the scientific work of the professors of the ECDF.

Prof. Maedche gave a talk on February 18th, 2025 at the  University College London Interaction Centre (UCLIC) on Biosignal-Adaptive Systems with a particular focus on supporting remote meetings.    Remote meetings as a modern way of work are widespread due to distributed team setups.  While there are various benefits in terms of time savings, reduced travel costs and emissions, there are also negative outcomes such as a lack of engagement or increased fatigue. Biosignal-adaptive systems that dynamically adapt to users represent a promising solution to improve remote meetings. 

This week, we had the pleasure of welcoming the team from the Cognitive Systems Engineering Lab (Prof. Taro KANNO, Yingting CHEN) of the University of Tokyo back to KIT—nearly half a year after their last visit. During their stay, we held several meetings to discuss ongoing research projects and explore new collaboration opportunities. In addition to these discussions, we conducted design workshops on the future of team work and AI as part of our collaborative study, further strengthening our exchange in the fields of human-centered and adaptive systems. Stay tuned for the results!

We welcome Dehui Kong as a new team member and doctoral student researcher at the Human-Centered Systems Lab of Prof. Mädche at KIT. 

Dehui holds a B.Sc. degree in Computer Science and Technology and an M.Sc. degree in Computer Technology from the University of Jinan. She will dedicate her research in the field of biosignal-adaptive immersive systems to support students in developing teamwork skills. Her doctoral project is funded by CSC. 

We recently contributed to a podcast about successfully integrating usability and UX into organizations and developing user-centered digital products. Host Sarah Stock, Janina Kouvaris, the managing director of UIG e.V., UX design strategist Doro Sthamer and Prof. Dr. Alexander Mädche, talk about this topic in this episode of the Digital Impact podcast of netzstrategen GmbH.

We welcome Daniel Faisst as a new team member and doctoral researcher at the human-centered systems lab of Prof. Mädche at KIT. He will join the Personalized Enterprise Systems research team. 

Daniel completed a bachelor's (B. Sc.) and master's degree (M. Sc.) at University of Bayreuth and wrote his master thesis about AI-based assistant systems.

The ACM Transactions on Interactive Intelligent Systems (ACM TIIS)  has published the paper "MALACHITE - Enabling Users to Teach GUI-Aware Natural Language Interfaces" for publication. The paper is co-authored by Marcel Ruoff (KIT), Brad Myers (Carnegie Mellon University, CMU) and Alexander Maedche (KIT). 

In this study, we designed the system MALACHITE through three formative studies.

On February 5th, 2025, Tuure Tuunanen presented a design science research project following the echeloned design science methodology focusing on designing a coopetitive news platform. Drawing on the strategic alliance literature, the proposoed coopetitive news platform is co-owned and operated by multiple competing publishers for cross-selling online news. 

We thank Tuure for his visit to WIN and his interesting talk!