For course descriptions, schedules, and further information, please visit the Teaching page.

The past years have been an amazing time and I am very grateful to everybody who supported me along the way. In particular, I would like to thank Prof. Dr. Sven Mayer, the Human-AI Interaction Group, the Research Center Trustworthy Data Science and Security (RC Trust), and TU Dortmund University for the opportunity to continue my research as a PostDoc. During this period, I was admitted to the Young Academy of TU Dortmund University, following a successful research grant proposal.

Equally, I am deeply grateful to Prof. Dr. Stefan Schneegass and the University of Duisburg-Essen, for giving me the opportunity become a doctoral student. Thank you everybody with whom I could collaborate ver the years, while doing research, teaching, sharing an office, and exchanging ideas.

At the Westphalian University of Applied Sciences, I will continue my work at the intersection of usable security, human-computer interaction, artificial intelligence, and extended reality. I am especially interested in how intelligent systems can better understand and support people, how agentic AI can assist with security-related tasks, and how implicit interaction can make security more seamless.

The conference has been an amazing experience: inspiring talks, lively discussions, many thoughtful research contributions, and many wonderful encounters with colleagues from across the human-computer interaction community. Duisburg has been a welcoming setting for exchanging ideas, reconnecting with familiar faces, and meeting new people.

This year, the program featured 36 short papers and 29 Work-in-Progress papers. Seeing this wide range of emerging ideas and research results come together has been especially rewarding. The short paper proceedings are available in the ACM Digital Library, while the Work-in-Progress proceedings are available through the GI Digital Library.

A heartfelt thank you to Maria and Henrik for the excellent collaboration, to all authors and reviewers for their hard work, and to the entire organizing team for making Mensch und Computer 2026 such a great conference.

In this new role, I am expanding my research from behavioral biometrics in extended reality toward agentic AI and implicit interaction. I look forward to exploring how intelligent systems can proactively support people while remaining trustworthy, secure, and centered on human needs. Read more in the RC Trust announcement.

As extended reality (XR) systems become more widely used, it becomes more and more important to employ usable authentication mechanisms. Previous work has shown that conventional methods such as PINs and passwords are cumbersome in virtual environments and may be prone to bystanders’ observation. My work therefore explores a different approach: identifying users implicitly and continuously through their spatiotemporal body movements and interactions.

Across six empirical studies, we investigated which aspects of human behavior can serve as reliable biometric signals and which factors influence recognition performance. These include movement components, physiological characteristics, colocated interactions, changes over time, gaze and head behavior, and fine-grained hand and finger movements. The results show that behavioral biometrics can enable reliable user identification in XR.

The dissertation is based on my research conducted between 2020 and 2025. I am sincerely grateful to everybody who contributed to the underlyign research.

My deepest thanks go to my supervisorreviewer, Prof. Dr. Stefan Schneegaß, for giving me the opportunity to pursue this doctorate and for all the guidance guidance and ideas over the years. I also thank my reviewers, Prof. Dr. Florian Alt and Prof. Dr. Antonio Krüger, for their time and thoughtful assessmentk. I am equally grateful to Prof. Dr. Gregor Schiele and Prof. Dr. Volker Gruhn for serving on and chairing the examination committee.

The dissertation is available open access through DuEPublico.