Interactions Research Group

We investigate technology-mediated interactions in complex socio-technical systems. Within this broad field, we are interested in a great many aspects of the interaction of (computer) systems with other systems as well as with people, and specifically in pervasive computing environments.

We invite you to browse our research, teaching, and members on this page! Also, have a look here for open topics for your Bachelor or Master thesis. You can find quick links to our publications at the very bottom.

Ongoing PhD Theses

In our group, the PhD work of Danai (Google Scholar) is on the bridging of affordance-driven and hypermedia-driven interaction in the design of adaptive interfaces for human and artificial agents in Web-based Multi-Agent Systems while Jérémy (Google Scholar) studies how heterogeneous agents can combine their own specialized knowledge and cognitive abilities in order to improve collaboration efficiency. Based on a fascination for bio-inspired technology in general and its application to software specifically, Alessandro is working on socio-technical systems as well, and currently applies this to the design and creation of information management systems for circular economy and sustainability. And Ganesh (Google Scholar) is striving to achieve autonomy in industrial control systems by making system and domain knowledge accessible to the automation agents, with a specific focus on autonomous buildings. 

More autonomous systems might behave in a way that is not so intelligible for their human users, and hard to interpret for other machines - hence, Sanjiv (Google Scholar) works towards explaining contextual influences on the behavior of cyber-physical systems using multimodal scene understanding. Turning more towards people, Damian (Google Scholar) investigates how the behavior of an industrial robot can be adapted to the implicit and explicit responses of humans to promote satisfactory human-robot interactions. Such personalization also features heavily in Jannis' (Google Scholar; Personal Website) research - Jannis studies how ubiquitous personalization systems can make our interactions with our environment more efficient, safer and more inclusive, and how they can be built in a responsible and societally beneficial way. Benefitting individuals and society is also core to Jing (Google Scholar) - her research work is about analytics-based behavior interventions to promote human health, specifically in the fields of nutrition and ambient lighting. 

Postdoctoral Researchers

Kim (Google Scholar) designs and studies systems that we refer to as Digital Companions; these are created to assist and protect their users while being aware of their privacy, and Kim uses a combination of machine-learning systems and symbolic approaches such as Knowledge Graphs in neuro-symbolic ensembles to achieve this. And Kenan (Google Scholar) brings in the human eye - quite literally, as since his PhD and during his postdoctoral studies he has been using eye tracking as an interaction mechanism and to study the workload of operators in human-robot interactions. All our work interacts with society, and societal processes, and hence regulation is a cross-cutting aspect - Clement (Google Scholar) brings in this dimension: He investigates the extent to which regulations (standards, laws, etc.) can and should be turned into an automatically processable format, for instance to automate compliance or facilitate their comprehension via querying possibilities.

Finally, our group is comprised of Andrei and Simon. Andrei (Google Scholar) is Assistant Professor for Web-based Systems and his research focuses on designing a new class of Web-based multi-agent systems (MAS) that inherit the architectural properties of the Web, preserve the properties of MAS, and are human-centric. And Simon (Google Scholar) is fascinated by the integration of concepts and approaches from across the fields of pervasive computing, hypermedia, human-computer interaction, and embedded systems to realize ideal interfaces between machines and animals.

To support bringing our research to practice, Lukas is our team's Research Entrepreneur - he is interested in exploring the commercial potential of newly emerging technologies and is particularly engaged in the fields of robotics (see Understanding Robots) and applications in the field of health care. And Jan is a software developer who maintains our lab's infrastructure and supports other team members in their research work wherever possible.

Come Visit Us!

We regularly welcome students from other international universities and other groups at the University of St.Gallen in our group. If you would like to work with us - for a Bachelor or Master thesis, a summer internship, or an idea that you'd like to realize together - get in touch with Simon!

And who has been a member in the past?

Since the creation of our group in the year 2018, we were privileged to have already had many short-term visitors. And there are also several colleagues who have left us again to take up their next (academic) challenge. These include Andres Gómez (Google Scholar, Personal Website) who is today an Associate Professor of Reliable Software and Hardware Systems at the Technical University of Braunschweig's Institute of Computer and Network Engineering.

The Chair of Interaction- and Communication-based Systems offers a series of challenging but rewarding courses on the topics of Ubiquitous Computing and Web-based Autonomous Systems as well as introductory courses to Computer Systems, Computer Networks, Distributed Systems, and to Computer Science more broadly.

In Autumn Semesters, we offer these courses:

• Computer Systems (Bachelor of Computer Science, Mandatory Course)
• Distributed Systems (Bachelor of Computer Science, Mandatory Course)
• Introduction to Robotics (Bachelor of Computer Science, Elective)
• Advanced Software and Systems Engineering (Master of Computer Science, Mandatory Course)
• Ubiquitous Computing (Master of Computer Science, Core Elective)
• Fundamentals and Methods of Computer Science for Business Studies (Bachelor of Business Administration, Mandatory Course)
• Interactive Information Visualization - From Theory to Experiments (Contextual Studies)

In Spring Semesters, we offer these courses:

• Computer Networks (Bachelor of Computer Science, Mandatory Course)
• Web-based Autonomous Systems (Master of Computer Science, Core Elective)
• Fundamentals and Methods of Computer Science for Business Studies (Bachelor of Business Administration, Mandatory Course)

We are always looking for motivated students who would like to write their thesis at our group!
See the topics below for currently available thesis topics.

If you have a topic in mind that is not listed here, feel free to contact Simon (simon.mayer@unisg.ch)!