I received the diploma in Applied Media Science (Angewandte Medienwissenschaft) from the Technical University Ilmenau. In 2006 I joined the research group for Applied Informatics (Angewandte Informatik) at Bielefeld University where I finished my PhD in April 2010 (more information about my thesis see below). Since 2009 I am a member of the Research Institute for Cognition and Robotics (CoR-Lab) in the Hybrid Society Group.

Research

I'm interested in the interplay between humans and multimodal systems which I believe can only be addressed from a highly interdisciplinary perspective. My research focuses on the question of how interfaces can be designed in order to be usable for the human users and to account for their expectations. The following list summarizes my main research topics.

Research topics

• user-centered interface design of multimodal systems
• human cognitive processes, expectations, and behaviours in human-machine interaction
• transfer of theories from social psychology to human-robot interaction
• evaluation of interfaces
• adaptation of evaluation methods for human-robot interaction
• perception of systems (behaviour and appearance) by users
• development of human-robot interaction corpuses and approaches for their analysis

PhD Thesis

My PhD thesis is entitled "Investigating the influence of situations and expectations on user behavior - empirical analyses in human-robot interaction". It focuses on the relation between situation and expectation - both well-established concepts in social psychology - and the behavior of users in the interaction with a robot. It aims to show how the development of interactive systems can benefit from interdisciplinary approaches and a user-centered point of view. My supervisor was Katharina Rohlfing and my reviewers were Martin Buss (TUM) and Sven Wachsmuth.

Teaching

• summer term 2010/2011 - Lecture with Exercises Usability und Evaluation multimodaler Systeme (Usability and evaluation of multimodal systems)
• summer term 2010/2011 - Seminar Social Robotics
• winter term 2008/2009 - Seminar Social Robotics
• winter term 2007/2008 - Seminar Social Robotics
• RO-MAN conference 2009 - Tutorial on "How to analyze human-robot interaction data"