News

The Decision Support Systems (DSS) Journal has published the paper "Effective use of open data story authoringportals for enterprises".social good: Design principles for explainable LLM-based open data assistants". The paper is co-authored Till Carlo Schelhorn, Ulrich Gnewuch, and Alexander Maedche from the Institute for Information Systems (WIN), human-centered systems lab (h-lab) and the University of Passau.

Public access to information through open data is critical for achieving the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goal 16, which promotes accountable and inclusive institutions. However, open data portals often present barriers, such as complex user interfaces and large data catalogs.

Bachelor's and master's students studying information systems (IS) at KIT can apply for an IS scholarship. The scholarship will start on October 1st, 2026 and will run for 12 months. Scholarship holders are supported with 300 Euros per month. The scholarship is awarded by the non-profit association "Die Wirtschaftsinformatik e.V." and serves to promote young people in the field of IS. The scholarship is funded by companies that provide the financial support and are involved in the awarding of the scholarship. For the 2025/26 period, overall seven IS scholarships will be awarded at KIT: 3 scholarships from Schwarz Digits KG, 2 scholarships from SAP SE, and 2 scholarships from Atruvia AG. Further information on the scholarships is available via: https://wirtschaftsinformatik.de/community/stipendien-wirtschaftsinformatik/ 

Cognitive and knowledge-intensive work can be automated using generative AI. Is AI outpacing us, or is it rendering us obsolete? What role will human thought and action play in the future? Which skills and competencies will become more important, and which will become obsolete? And what does this mean for learning? What should good education look like, and what should it achieve? These questions - and more - were the focus on the panel discussion “KI kontrovers!” on May 20, 2026 at WU Vienna. Alexander Mädche (Institute for Information Systems, human-centered systems lab) participated in this panel discussion alongside Christoph Wiederkehr, Austria's Federal Minister of Education; Anita Eichinger, Director of the Vienna Library; and Marie-Christine Kainz, a student and Deputy Chairperson of the ÖH WU. The panel discussion moderated by Thomas Grisold, WU Vienna.

We are delighted to announce the appointment of Dr. Xuanhui Liu, former member of the human-centered systems lab (h-lab) as associate professor at the Department of Industrial Design of Ningbo University (NBO), Zhejiang in China. Xuanhui worked at the human-centered systems lab in the time frame between 2015-2019 and successfully defended her PhD thesis titled “"Designing Decision Aids for Digital Service Design Technique Selection” in 2019. After finalizing her PhD project, she worked at Hangzhou City University as a postdoctoral researcher. Further information is available here: https://pada.nbu.edu.cn/info/1359/47614.htm

We wish her all the best and look forward to future cooperation.

We are proud to congratulate Dr.-Ing. Martin Feick from the human-centered systems lab on receiving the prestigious 2026 SIGCHI Outstanding Dissertation Award as part of CHI 2026 in Barcelona.  Martin's doctoral thesis titled “Hand-based Illusions for Haptics in Virtual Reality” was supervised by Prof. Dr. Antonio Krüger at the UMTL (Saarland University and DFKI) and Prof. Anthony Tang at Singapore Management University.

Martin’s dissertation advances VR haptics by combining novel hand-based illusions with proxy technology and adaptive personalization.

We are happy to announce that the paper “Designing a mobile chatbot-based learning journaling system for intrinsic motivation and engagement” co-authored by Sven Scheu, Simone Löffler, and Alexander Maedche has been published in the International Journal of Educational Technology in Higher Education. The study presents a mobile journaling system with a built-in course and LLM assistant; results show the course boosts motivation, while the assistant increases engagement over time.

The Institute for Information Systems (WIN) will be represented with four research papers at the 21st International Conference on Design Science Research in Information Systems and Technology (DESRIST), taking place in Münster! Congratulations to all authors on their contributions to the design science community. We look forward to insightful discussions and meeting you in Münster! For further information, please contact the authors directly or visit the websites of the respective research groups (https://www.win.kit.edu/about_us.php)

The ACM Designing Interactive Systems (DIS) Conference is the premier international event for researchers, designers, and artists to debate and shape the future of interactive systems, design practice, and HCI. Three papers of our group got accepted: “Who Did What? Designing Avatars for Explainable Multi-Agent Systems in Knowledge Work” “MorphHat: A Humanoid Robot Interpreter for Enhancing Multilingual Collaboration”. “(AI)ming For Harmony: Designing Future AI Teammates for Human Conflict Resolution”

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!