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

Next year‘s PreCHI will be in Munich at LMU. #PreCHI2026

German PreCHI 2025 is starting! Looking forward to get a preview of lots of papers others will see in Yokahama … #CHI2025

Arrived in Sardinia for IUI2025… what a beautiful island - stunning drive from Olbia to Cagliari and morning stroll at the coast - already good discussions over breakfast 🙂 looking forward to a lot of inspiration over the week with the latest in intelligent interactive system! @mimuc.bsky.social

The LMU media informatics doctoral colloquium comes to an end with lots of inspirations and new ideas to go forward! Thanks to DFKI for hosting us. Discussing in depth with our researchers always makes me optimistic about the future - with regard to science and society :) @mimuc.bsky.social

Visual impairment is very common - and with an aging society challenges are increase and there is still very little research. Jesse Grootjen summarizes his PhD research (which he currently writes up:) on how to detect and mitigate some of these issues. @mimuc.bsky.social

How are we transferring ideas, concepts and knowledge between people? Clara Sayffaerth shared ideas of how we can rethink learning and teaching. Excited about a new experiment were we use an life-like avatar to see the impact on learners

Thomas Weber shared the ideas of a new project we started on the use of generative AI to create software with interactive and human readable specifications. What will software be in the future - developed or just in time created? Who will build software?more questions than answers…

We live in a hybrid world - the digital and physical are intertwined. How can we create a positive user experiences in a hybrid world, how to design technologies for this? Sophia Sakel put more questions in this space forward and shared answers from her research. @mimuc.bsky.social

Julian Rasch in the final stretch of his PhD on communication, collaboration and intentions in XR. @mimuc.bsky.social

Francesco Chiossi is presenting ideas for a new take on the Midas Touch problem in XR. Looking at different aspects of the EEG signal there is hope to get the anticipation of an action. @mimuc.bsky.social

Bettina Eska is working on supporting motor learning and reflection on motor activity. The focus is on learning and improving sports and anchored in motor learning theories (and hopefully applicable beyond sports). @mimuc.bsky.social

Florian Lang shares research on accessibility for people with visual impairment for VR and AR. Not obvious and pretty difficult to give a broad range of people access to XR even with limited vision. @mimuc.bsky.social

Henrike Weingärtner is discussing her idea of how to shape the topic „digital legacies after death“ for her thesis. There are so many interesting questions and challenges! The focus is on what a „will“ constitutes in a digital space. @mimuc.bsky.social

Kathrin Schnizer sharing her first experiment designs for combining gaze and EEG to predict understanding of visualizations as part of the DFG @SfbTrr161 - interesting discussions on what is the minimal valid experiment and how ML allows us to move beyond P300 … @mimuc

Maximiliane Windl - who is writing up - presenting her ideas for an overarching human centered privacy and security framework at the our spring doctoral colloquium in Saarbrücken @MaxiWindl @mimuc

Antonio Krüger’s Keynote „Towards Environmental-Aware and Trustworthy AI“ at our doctoral colloquium we do in Saarbrücken at &DFKI (German research center for AI). Seeing research at DFKI is amazing. Interesting aspect of trust - of humans in AI but also between machines @mimuc

AI-Hub@LMU grand opening tonight! Started with a first “the good in the große Aula” became animinated with AI! Thanks to Gitta Kutyniok Frauke Kreuter and Eyke Hüllermeier for initiating this!@mimuc @LMU_Muenchen @GittaKutyniok @fraukolos @eyke_hu

IS-EUD has a new social media account - please follow to stay updated ... the submission deadline is Feb 28. The event is in Munich in June - iseud2025.ubicomp.net