Personal record (below 6 hours) from Brussels to Crailsheim with Deutsche Bahn - interestingly only possible due to delayed trains that made my changes feasible but extremely quick :) A sincere thank you - especially to staff on the trains that have to work on Karneval.
The minister president of Bavaria Söder made a strong statement “Investments in research, education, and universities is an investment in democracy”. He acknowledges that for research and innovation freedom and democracy is essential. And for freedom and democracy research and science is essential!
Matthias Tschöp highlights in his inaugural address at the @lmumuenchen.bsky.social the fundamental importance of science - of all sciences. research needs freedom! scientists need space for exploration and curiosity - without knowing the applications. Excellent research is hard work - everyday.
Joanna Bergström is visiting our lab in Munich! interesting discussions on embodied interaction in VR. Great talk „the virtual body as interface: motorleaning for interaction in virtual reality“ in the context of the www.sfbtrr161.de lecture series. @sfbtrr161.bsky.social
Tutorial on system promp engineering by Christopher Lazik and Yannick Weiß at #Winterschool2026. A hands on session using LM Studio and “playing against each other” - fun group work, high motivation and interesting insights (see images for details)
Jan Gugenheimer run a session on “Cognitive Augmentation and Manipulation” looking at different way LLMs and genAI in combination with AR/WR push the frontiers of descriptive designs … including a black mirror writing exercise :)
Can you run meaningful AI stuff on a ESP32? LMM on a raspberry pi? PI AI hat+ or Jetson Nano? Philipp Thalhammer and Boris Kegeles showed some devices and hardware (with demos :) and we got to do a hands on exercise… for the source code see github.com/Phlipinator/... #winterschool2026
What do you expect from your supervisor? What is a success PhD? What do I as supervisor expect from my students? When is a PhD ready? We collected, discussed, consolidated in groups and looked to identify potential mismatches, alignments, and conflicts. So many interesting point #winterschool2026
Jan Leusmann kicked off the second part of #winterschool. Jasmin Niess discussed how we can engage with theory and advance the HCI foundations. What is theory-based research in HCI? It is really important to reflect that HCI has a plurality of approaches in theory research. #winterschool2026
Mentoring is essential to academic live! Jasmin Niess is running our #winterschool2026 mentoring session - especially focusing on how we find mentors, can you benefit from mentoring and how you can be a good mentor. Mentoring newer stops… you never grow out of needing a mentor
Next session by Maximiliane Windl and Jan Leusmann on coding and creating scripts for data analysis with GenAI. Some tools (github.com/copilot, cursor.com, windsurf.com, antigravity.google, ChatGPT) and a fun group session. My take away is that empirical research will change massively in the future.
How can you improve your experiment design with AI? Fiona Draxler gave us examples how to get started with using AI methods and experimental designs and mad us reflect with some exercise (see pictures).
Marco Gutfleisch showed us his work on“Systematically Sourcing Grey Literature with GenAI and Modern Search Engines”. Very interesting links and insights of using search engine APIs and combining them with other AI tools. Some links tlooto.com www.tavily.com consensus.app
Matthias Schmidmaier started the day at #Winterschool2026 off with “Realtime Interaction with Intelligent Agents in User Research”. Was interesting to see how to implement a conversational agend with current AI tools. Lots on discussion on implications of using conversational agends in HCI research.
Pascal Knierim shared his research on VR training for Avalanche Rescue Training - what a fitting topic for the first night of the Winterschool. Good discussions on how to validate the VR learning success. See Pascal’s paper at ISMAR doi: 10.1109/ISMAR67309.2025.00139.
Reinforcement learning for interactive systems. Sven Mayer started with an overview (eg Atari, AlphaGo). Highlighting challenges, he walked us through a pong example. Good discussions on reward predictions and credit assignment problem in real applications
#winterschool2026 @svenmayer.bsky.social
Our winterschool 2026 started with a session on “Writing Research Papers with LLM” focusing on improving abstracts. Looked at how using LLMs to work with structured abstracts; how we would design a tool for Human-AI co-writing of high quality abstracts. Always fun to teach with @svenmayer.bsky.soc
Apply to the 13th #HeidelbergLaureateForum #HLF by Feb 11, 2026.
Spend a week (Sept 13–18), 2026 with Turing Award, Fields Medal, Abel Prize & ACM Prize in Computing laureates — and an outstanding young researchers.
application.heidelberg-laureate-forum.org/site/index.php
#PhDLife #Postdoc
Congratulations to Dr. Maximiliane Windl for defending her PhD work on privacy for smart environments - an impressive body of work- well done. And thanks to the committee for reading and questioning M. Angela Sasse Florian Schaub Florian Alt @mimuc.bsky.social
Thomas Wortmann starts of the DFG @sfbtrr161.bsky.social status seminar with his inspiring keynote on “AI for Architecture, Engineering, and Construction”. I couldn’t resist to ask the question if we could take people and their experiences while in buildings as signals for optimisation?
ACM MobileHCI is for the first time in Africa! Theme: dive into mobileAI. Research is international and mobile technologies are used globally but in very different ways. What an opportunity to discuss perspective and sharing insights. 40 papers and a lot more content to see. #dAIve #mobileHCI2025
The future will be fine! a day at #mobileHCI2025 with young researchers boosted my optimism. Presentations and intense discussions on science, research, and life at the doctoral colloquium re-ensured me that the next generation is amazing and will bring us forward. @mobilehci.bsky.social
Final preparations are on the way for #mobileHCI2025 in Sharm El Sheikh! @svenmayer.bsky.social
experience with ChatGPT to write code? used copilot or created an App with loveable.dev? Or have you set up your own environment for GenAI software def? What do you think about vibe coding? Please share your experiences and opinions with us. migroup.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_...
Simone Stumpf presenting the opening keynote on “Engineering responsible AI” at ACM EICS2025 - in an absolutely beautiful setting in Trier. She argues that we need methods along the entire lived cycle and systematically adapt engineering methods. eics.acm.org/2025/
SpaceCHI 2025 is starting at the Astronaut training center in Cologne - another week another conference:) spacechi.media.mit.edu
Exited to get resources to push the boundaries of human-centred AI and to enable truly personal AI-models. very thankful that the EU has the ERC funding instrument for basic research! Also looking forward to creating an interdisciplinary team www.ai-twin.eu (sign up on the page for more information)
So amazed to get the chance to do my dream research on Human-AI interaction supported by @erc.europa.eu - check out www.ai-twin.eu - how can we create AI models that encode our very personal experiences and how to use them to amplify our cognitive abilities?
CfP for the upcoming workshop: *The Role of Design in the Future of Human-AI Interaction* at Aarhus 2025.
uni.ubicomp.net/Aarhus2025/
As part of aarhus2025.org
Rolling deadline: submit now! We plan to respond within one week!
Janin Koch, Wendy Mackay, Albrecht Schmidt
@bidt.bsky.social Kick-off at BIDT for a new set of projects on Human-ai co-creation. In our project we look into democratization of software development by co-creation of spezifications as intermediate representations for software. Thomas Weber, @svenmayer.bsky.social @mimuc.bsky.social
