Dr. Florian Bemmann
| E-Mail |
florian.bemmann ät ifi.lmu.de |
| Phone |
+49-89 / 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
LMU Munich
Media Informatics Group
Frauenlobstr. 7a
80337 Munich, Germany |
| Room |
453 (4th floor) |
Current Research Interests
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.
Further and Previous Research Interests
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. 
Theses and Project Work
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.
Open Theses
Open Positions as HiWi and Working Student
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
| 2025 |
![[Download PDF]](/pubdb/publications/images/pdf.png "Download PDF")
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)
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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)
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| 2024 |
Download |
Florian Bemmann
Privacy Preserving User Quantification with Smartphone Sensing
PhD Thesis. LMU Munich.
(bib)
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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)
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Florian Bemmann, Helena Stoll, Sven Mayer
Privacy Slider: Fine-Grain Privacy Control for Smartphones
MobileHCI 2024, Sept. 30 - Oct. 3, 2024, Melbourne, Australia
(bib)
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| 2023 |
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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)
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Florian Bemmann
User-Centered Privacy to Improve User Quantification using Smartphone Sensing
MobileHCI 2023, Sept. 26 - 29, 2023, Athens, Greece
(bib)
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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)
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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)
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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)
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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)
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| 2022 |
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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)
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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)
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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)
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| 2021 |
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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)
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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)
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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)
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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)
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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)
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| 2020 |
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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)
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![[Download video]](/pubdb/publications/images/video.png "Download video")
Download |
Florian Bemmann, Heinrich Hussmann
Self-Reflection as a Tool to Foster Profound Sustainable Consumption Decisions
ICT4S 2020 Poster, Bristol, UK, June 2020
(bib)
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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)
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| 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)
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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
