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. Luka (Google Scholar) focuses on understanding and addressing the systemic risks posed by Very Large Online Platforms, combining methods from tech law, computer science, and social sciences to study how platforms personalized recommender systems influence us, while developing tools to enhance transparency and accountability in their operation. 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:
In Spring Semesters, we offer these courses:
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)!
Social media platforms have become the new public squares, wielding massive influence over how billions of people consume information, form opinions, and take decisions. Yet, beneath the surface of these seemingly personalized experiences lies a profound challenge: the algorithms powering these platforms don’t just recommend content—they shape worldviews, amplify divisions, and steer societal discourse.
This thesis examines the systemic risks associated with personalized recommender systems on Very Large Online Platforms (VLOPs). While these systems are designed to enhance user engagement through content personalization, they often lead to unintended consequences, such as the formation of filter bubbles, distortion of public opinion, and increased societal polarization. Despite new regulations in the EU, such as the Digital Services Act (DSA), which promote data transparency and accountability from VLOPs, researchers continue to face significant barriers in accessing platform data from platforms like X (formerly Twitter), Instagram, TikTok, and others.
By employing black-box testing as a methodological framework, this project focuses on identifying, analyzing, assessing, and mitigating systemic risks. Additionally, it evaluates the effectiveness of the DSA in enabling meaningful research on these issues. Given the pivotal role of social media in shaping public discourse—especially during the major global elections of 2024 and the enforcement of the DSA—this research is both timely and critical.
In this interdisciplinary project, you will work at the crossroads of Computer Science, Legal/Platform Regulations, and Social Sciences. While the main focus lies in Computer Science, the project integrates insights from platform governance and societal impact to build a system/framework for evaluating systemic risks in Personalized Recommender Systems.
This framework will address key challenges in assessing the societal, ethical, and technical implications of recommender systems, contributing to state-of-the-art methods for evaluating their impact. You will have the opportunity to leverage your technical skills while exploring the broader regulatory and social dimensions of this critical field.
This project is great for you, if you are:
Unsure about the topic? See here for additional readings:
Reach out if you're interested!
Luka Bekavac: lukajurelars.bekavac@unisg.ch
Prof. Simon Mayer: simon.mayer@unisg.ch
The personalization of an interface in Mixed Reality (MR) can be very beneficial for users since it, e.g., enables them to use the interface based on their abilities and capabilities, or to interact more efficiently. Personalization describes the adaptation of a system based on personal data (e.g, demographics, level of expertise, real-time physiological data, user context data). For instance, to control a robotic arm in a human-robot collaboration scenario, an expert user could see a more complex interface with more fine-grained control options than a novice user. Additionally, the interface might be adapted based on their preferred language, current cognitive state, or the task they are currently performing. However, users might not know why the interface is adapted, if they are not informed about it in a well-designed manner. Especially when many parameters are part of the personalization, it can be challenging to design an appropriate interface that does not lead to an increased cognitive load for users. Therefore, we are interested in studying how users can be informed transparently about why and how an interface has been personalized for them, to increase their trust in the system and potentially to let users adapt the personalization parameters.
In this project, you will:
If you are a Master's student, you will additionally:
This project is great for you, if you are:
Reach out if you are interested!
Jannis Strecker jannisrene.strecker@unisg.ch
Solid (Social Linked Data) is a specification to create a decentralized data platform for Web applications; its objective is to allow the management of users’ data independently of the applications that create and consume such data: Applications are decoupled from the data they use.
To realize Solid, users' data is stored in a Web-accessible personal online datastore: a Pod. Developers can use the Solid protocol based on existing W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) recommendations for reading, writing, and controlling (e.g., access control) the contents of users’ Pods. Users are able to grant access to their data, and have the option to stop sharing their data or switch between applications at any time [1].
Mixed Reality (MR) devices such as the Microsoft HoloLens 2 (HL2) are often equipped with capabilities that can track personal data such as eye trackers that allow to record a user's gaze behavior. Such data is personal and highly sensitive, since it can be used to not only estimate the activity that a user currently performs, but also to estimate other personal information of the user, from drug consumption to cultural background [2]. Thus, to avoid creating several copies of the data and sharing them with others through traditional means (e.g., a Data Controller that runs a gaze-sharing platform), the use of Solid enables a user to retain control about where their data is and who accesses it.
We developed the Solid Interaction Library for C# which includes all basic functions to interact with Solid Pods directly from a HL2. However, this library does not include any user interface elements.
With this thesis, we explore the integration of Solid and MR using an HL2. Concretely, this thesis implements an application for the HL2 that provides an MR UI for interacting with a Solid Pod. The implemented app furthermore provides an intuitive way to share data from the HL2 in real-time with others via Solid. This may include, e.g, one's current gaze data, current activity or detected objects in the user's environment.
[1] Sambra, Essam Mansour, Sandro Hawke, Maged Zereba, Nicola Greco, Abdurrahman Ghanem, D. Zagidulin, Ashraf Aboulnaga, and T. Berners-Lee. Solid : A Platform for Decentralized Social Applications Based on Linked Data. 2016.
[2] Jacob Leon Kröger, Otto Hans-Martin Lutz, and Florian Müller. What Does Your Gaze Reveal About You? On the Privacy Implications of Eye Tracking. In Michael Friedewald, Melek ¨Onen, Eva Lievens, Stephan Krenn, and Samuel Fricker, editors, Privacy and Identity Management. Data for Better Living: AI and Privacy, volume 576, pages 226–241. Springer International Publishing, Cham, 2020.
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This project is great for you, if you are:
Reach out if you are interested!
Jannis Strecker: jannisrene.strecker@unisg.ch
Dr. Kimberly Garcia: kimberly.garcia@unisg.ch
Are you interested in digital health and market research? We offer the possibility of empirically conducting market research and strategic planning for a nutrition-related start-up. The master thesis should develop a scientifically sound and comprehensive concept for the start-up’s business plan. The details about the start-up will be communicated to the student doing the thesis.
What will you do?
Why join us?
Who are we looking for?
Contact Information
For more information, please contact Jing Wu at jing.wu@unisg.ch
Application Deadline
25/07/2024
Software Engineer
Postdoctoral Researcher
Assistant Professor
Research Assistant
Full Professor, Interaction and Communication based Systems
Research Assistant
Research Associate
Research Assistant, Hypermedia Multi-agent Systems
Research Assistant