Dr. Florian Bemmann

E-Mail	florian.bemmann ät ifi.lmu.de
Telefon	089 / 2180-75145 This phone number is not in use at the moment, please contact me via email, I will try to reply asap.
Address	Dr. Florian Bemmann Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München Media Informatics Group Frauenlobstr. 7a 80337 München
Room	453 (4. Stock)

Aktuelle Forschungsinteressen

Improving The Effect Of Information Technology On Humans And Our Societies

The Big Picture

Since the last few years, our societies tend to polarize. People feel their interests are badly represented by their governments, they loose trust in the democratic system and institutions, and an overall misperception spreads on current issues in our society. One component that fosters this development is how we consume and exchange information on social media. Naturally, we humans are overwhelmed by the amount and availability of information that modern digital news sites, social media platforms, and news aggregators and recommenders bring. People strive for simplified, selected, emotional messages. Modern news and media portals leverage this to show their users contents that catch them especially well, to increase their platform usage. Emotional, rather extreme, but short and simple to overview stories are therefore most effective; however, also lead to a distorted perception of the reality, enforce one's opinion filter bubble which leads to polarization and distorted public opinion making.

My Vision

As designers, researchers, and developers in the field of human-computer interaction, it is our role to shape such effects through our system and interface designs. To contribute to a sustainable future, we need to rethink the design of nowadays news and social media systems. Considering interdisciplinary knowledge is therefore vital. Research in communication sciences, psychology, and sociology has studied the aforementioned phenomena and proposed solutions. The societal discourse needs to be strengthened again, i.e., requires more openness to, tolerance for and respect for other opinions. We need to be able to engage in discussions between groups of different political orientations without antagonizing each other.

What I do

In my work, I envision bringing promising ideas from the social sciences into practice in our digital information technologies. I, therefore, leverage recent advancements such as AI-based conversational agents that enable automatized, natural conversations with people, LLM-based content annotation in social media platforms, or public displays that reach a balanced audience in opportune moments. I am also interested in rethinking the ways we are dealing with information more fundamentally, for example considering decentralized information management approaches and different organizational approaches of news and social media publishers and aggregators.

Weitere und Ehemalige Forschungsinteressen

Improving Smartphone Privacy Without Obstructing Data Usability

Smartphones and their modern intelligent assistants require sufficient contextual user data in order to provide good outputs that are relevant for the user and applicable to their real-world lives. However, such data demands impose privacy issues, which make users reluctant of granting these accesses. This throttles the development of novel intelligent assistants, and finally worsens the user experience of our smartphones.
In my PhD thesis entitled Privacy Preserving User Quantification with Smartphone Sensing, I studied how we can allow detailed user behavioral and contextual data to be used, while preserving the user's privacy.

How can Technology Support Sustainable Behavior?

Although the majority of the german population describes themselves as green, fewer people actually behave so [Terlau, Hirsch 2015]. In my research I investigate how technology can help to overcome current barriers hindering sustainable behavior. It includes (among others) (1) the study of technology that can increase the awareness of behavior's impact and its quantification, (2) finding ways to assess information about the footprint of consumption goods, and provide it in an opportune manner, (3) an investigation of the influence of group dynamics and social context, (4) overcoming the problem that each actor's (positive) impact is just a small brick in the puzzle, (5) the evaluation of insights of the field of Persuasive Technology in the domain of sustainability. My aim is to deploy technology that makes the user aware of the impact of his or her behavior, and help people to bridge the attitude-behavior gap.
If you want to get an overview of my latest research in the area of pro-environmental behaviour, I recommend to watch my talk at the Public Climate School 2020 (in German):

Mobile Sensing Technology

Smartphones and other mobile devices are ubiquitous in many people's everyday lifes. Equipped with lots of sensors and connectivity, it is possible to assess or approximate many aspects about the user's actions, context and environment. Thereby they can be leveraged to collect data for interdisciplinary research, fuel adaptive applications, or feed crowd-based data platforms. In my research I investigate how mobile devices' passive sensing capabilities can be leveraged for the aforementioned purposes, while protecting the user's privacy. That encompasses but is not limited to interaction approaches that include the human more in the data collection process and on-device feature extraction procedures.

Personal Informatics: End User Data Science

Building on the aforementioned area of Mobile Sensing, I in the next step aim to enable the user take make use of their data. Current mobile devices offer only rare options to generate insights from the collected data, the magic usually happens on company servers somewhere in the cloud. I explore projects where users is given the ability to gain insights from their local data themselves. Therefore I am looking for solutions on several uncertainties, e.g. what is technically possible locally on a mobile device with one-person-data at all, or how interactivity can be brought into actually complex prediction procedures.

Previous Projects

PhoneStudy

The PhoneStudy project is an interdisciplinary Mobile Sensing research project, brought to life by the chair of Psychological Methods and Assessment, Mediainformatics, and Computational Statistics. Its integral part is the PhoneStudy research app, that assesses behavioral and contextual data of study participants in the wild. The data is then used to investigate the relationships between personality, emotions and people's behavior. As lead developer of the PhoneStudy project I coordinate the development and maintenance of the PhoneStudy apps and infrastructure since November 2018. I've been in charge of technically managing a handful of studies, ranging from university internal ones to collaboration projects across multiple German universities and panelists. In our most recent project we created a german representative benchmark dataset encompassing 800 participants for 3 to 6 months. Furthermore I use the PhoneStudy project as solid basis for most of my mobile sensing based research projects and theseses. Logo of the PhoneStudy mobile sensing project

Abschlussarbeiten und Praktika

Feel free to reach out to me if you are interested in one of my open topics, or have an own idea that fits to my above mentioned current research interests.

Offene Abschlussarbeiten

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Offene HiWi- und Werkstudenten Stellen

Student Developer (HiWi) for Fullstack AppDevelopment

We are looking for a student Android developer, to support an interdisciplinary research project with our partners from Munich and Heidelberg. If your are interested in psychology research and are motivated to develop an app that enables field research, then check out this position offer.

Publications

2026
Download	Doruntina Murtezaj, Xuanyu Zhou, Florian Bemmann, Viktorija Paneva, Florian Alt Catch the Phish: A Gamified Public Display to Encourage Anti-Phishing Behaviors In PerDis '26: Proceedings of the 2026 ACM International Symposium on Pervasive Displays. March 16, 2026. Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA. (bib)
Download	Doruntina Murtezaj, Timo Koethe, Florian Bemmann, Viktorija Paneva, Florian Alt Interactive Public Displays for Everyday Security: The Case of Software Updates In PerDis '26: Proceedings of the 2026 ACM International Symposium on Pervasive Displays. March 16, 2026. Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA. (bib)
2025
Download	Florian Bemmann, Maximiliane Windl, Tobias Knobloch, Sven Mayer European Users' In-Depth Privacy Concerns with Smartphone Data Collection MobileHCI 2025, Sept. 22 - 25, 2025, Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt (bib)
Download	Florian Bemmann, Doruntina Murtezaj Rethinking News and Media System Design Towards Positive Societal Implications Workshop on News Futures @ CHI 2025, April 26, 2025, Yokohama, Japan (bib)
2024
Download	Florian Bemmann Privacy Preserving User Quantification with Smartphone Sensing PhD Thesis. LMU Munich. (bib)
Download	Florian Bemmann, Sven Mayer The Impact of Data Privacy on Users' Smartphone App Adoption Decisions MobileHCI 2024, Sept. 30 - Oct. 3, 2024, Melbourne, Australia (bib)
Download	Florian Bemmann, Helena Stoll, Sven Mayer Privacy Slider: Fine-Grain Privacy Control for Smartphones MobileHCI 2024, Sept. 30 - Oct. 3, 2024, Melbourne, Australia (bib)
2023
Download	Nađa Terzimehić, Florian Bemmann, Miriam Halsner, Sven Mayer A Mixed-Method Exploration into the Mobile Phone Rabbit Hole MobileHCI 2023, Sept. 26 - 29, 2023, Athens, Greece (bib)
Download	Florian Bemmann User-Centered Privacy to Improve User Quantification using Smartphone Sensing MobileHCI 2023, Sept. 26 - 29, 2023, Athens, Greece (bib)
Download	Sophia Sakel, Florian Bemmann, Sven Mayer Exploring Data-Driven Approaches to Support Depression Therapy Workshop on Intelligent Data-Driven Health Interfaces @ Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI'23), April 23-28, 2023, Hamburg, Germany (bib)
Download	Ramona Schödel, Fiona Kunz, Maximilian Bergmann, Florian Bemmann, Markus Bühner, Larissa Sust Snapshots of Daily Life: Situations Investigated Through the Lens of Smartphone Sensing Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (bib)
Download	Florian Bemmann, Sven Mayer User-Centered Sustainable Technology Design: A Reflection on Human-Computer Interaction Research for a Sustainable Society Joint Proceedings of ICT4S 2023 Doctoral Symposium, Demonstrations & Posters Track and Workshops. Co-located with ICT4S 2023. Rennes, France, June 05-09, 2023. (bib)
Download	Florian Bemmann, Carmen Mayer, Sven Mayer Leveraging Mobile Sensing Technology for Societal Change Towards more Sustainable Behavior Workshop on HCI for Climate Change @ CHI 2023, April 23-28, 2023, Hamburg, Germany (bib)
2022
Download	Efsun Birtwistle, Ramona Schödel, Florian Bemmann, Astrid Wirth, Christoph Suerig, Clemens Stachl, Markus Bühner, Frank Niklas Mobile sensing in psychological and educational research: Examples from two application fields International Journal of Testing; Volume 22, 2022 - Issue 3-4: Special Issue on Technology-Based Assessments in Organizational, Psychological, and Educational Research and Applications (bib)
Download	Florian Bemmann, Daniel Buschek Interaction Challenges for N-Of-One Experiments based on Mobile Sensing Data Workshop on Grand Challenges in Personal Informatics and AI @ CHI 2022, May 11, 2022, Online (bib)
Download	Florian Bemmann, Maximiliane Windl, Jonas Erbe, Sven Mayer, Heinrich Hussmann The Influence of Transparency and Control on the Willingness of Data Sharing in Adaptive Mobile Apps MobileHCI 2022, Sept. 28 - Oct. 1, 2022, Vancouver, Canada (bib)
2021
Download	Nađa Terzimehić, Svenja Schött, Florian Bemmann, Daniel Buschek MEMEories: Internet Memes as Means for Daily Journaling In Designing Interactive Systems Conference 2021 (DIS '21). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 538-548. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3461778.3462080 (bib)
Download	Christina Schneegaß, Diana Irmscher, Florian Bemmann, Daniel Buschek LYLO - Exploring Disclosed Configurations for Inter-Personal Location Sharing In CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems Extended Abstracts (CHI'21 Extended Abstracts), May 8-13, 2021, Yokohama Japan. ACM, New York, NY, USA (bib)
Download	Florian Bemmann, Daniel Buschek, Heinrich Hussmann Interactive End-User Machine Learning to Boost Explainability and Transparency of Digital Footprint Data HCXAI Workshop @ CHI 2021, May 08-13, 2021, Yokohama, Japan (bib)
Download	Florian Bemmann, Ramona Schödel, Niels van Berkel, Daniel Buschek Chatbots for Experience Sampling - Initial Opportunities and Challenges Joint Proceedings of the ACM IUI 2021 Workshops, April 13-17, 2021, College Station, USA (bib)
Download	Sarah Aragon Bartsch, Christina Schneegaß, Florian Bemmann, Daniel Buschek A Day in the Life: Exploring the Use of Scheduled Mobile Chat Messages for Career Guidance 20th International Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Multimedia (MUM 2021), December 5-8, 2021, Leuven, Belgium (bib)
2020
Download	Linda Hirsch, Beat Rossmy, Florian Bemmann, Andreas Butz Affordances Based on Traces of Use in Urban Environments In Proceedings of the Fourteenth International Conference on Tangible, Embedded, and Embodied Interaction (TEI '20). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 729-742. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1145/3374920.3375007 (bib)
Download	Florian Bemmann, Heinrich Hussmann Self-Reflection as a Tool to Foster Profound Sustainable Consumption Decisions ICT4S 2020 Poster, Bristol, UK, June 2020 (bib)
Download	Florian Bemmann, Daniel Buschek LanguageLogger: A Mobile Keyboard Application for Studying Language Use in Everyday Text Communication in the Wild Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, June 2020, Article No. 84 (bib)
2018
Download	Nađa Terzimehić, Mohamed Khamis, Florian Bemmann, Heinrich Hussmann Lunchocracy: Improving Eating Dynamics in the Workplace Using a Bot-Based Anonymous Voting System In CHI '18 EA: Extended Abstracts of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA 2018) (bib)

Teaching

I have been teaching students in our Bachelors- and Master classes in the past years. Unless noted otherwise, I've been course assistant in the following:

Lecture Online Multimedia

as course assistant: WiSe 24/25 - 19/20

as student tutor: WiSe 18/19 - 17/18

Lecture Multimedia Programming

SoSe 2023 - 2019

Practical Reinforcement Learning

SoSe 2023

Practical Intelligent Interactive Systems

WiSe 23/24 and SoSe 2024

Practical Privacy and Security

WiSe 24/25

Practical Creative Coding

SoSe 2024

Pro- and Advanced Seminar Media Informatics

WiSe 24/25 - 2021