
Sarah Theres Völkel
sarah.voelkel ät ifi.lmu.de | |
Phone | +49-89 / 2180-75134 |
Address | Sarah Theres Völkel University of Munich (LMU) Media Informatics Group Frauenlobstr. 7a 80337 Munich, Germany |
Room | 455 (4th floor) |
Research Interests

Describing conversational agent personality
Users automatically and unconsciously attribute conversational agents a personality based on their observable behaviour [Reeves and Nass 2005]. Current research primiarily uses the established Big 5 model from Psychology to describe conversational agent personality. However, this model for human personality seems unsuitable to describe conversational agent personality since it is based on a lexical approach. In our research, we examine alternative descriptions for conversational agent personality.

Maching agent and user personality
Today's conversational agents take a one-size-fits-all approach [Vlahos 2019]. According to the Similarity Attraction Paradigm, adapting an intelligent agent’s personality to the human user was found to increase credibility, perceived competence, performance, and compliance [Andrist et al. 2015, Nass and Brave 2005, Tapus and Mataric 2008]. In our research, we examine the applicability of the Similarity Attraction Paradigm for conversational agents.

Explainable AI
The complex nature of intelligent systems motivates work on supporting users during interaction, for example through explanations. However, there is yet little empirical evidence on specific problems users face in such systems in everyday use. In our research we investigate such problems as reported by users as well as corresponding implications for designing explainable intelligent user interfaces.
Research Cooperations

User-centered Machine Learning at Audi AG
I'm a cooperation PhD student at Audi AG. In an interdisciplinary projects, together with my colleagues Clemens Stachl, Ramona Schödel from Psychology and Quay Au from Statistics, we are working on using machine learning to solve human computer interaction problems.

The PhoneStudy Research Projekct
The PhoneStudy is an interdisciplinary mobile sensing research project at LMU Munich, coordinated by Dr. Clemens Stachl. Collecting smartphone usage data, machine learning algorithms are used to predict humans' individual usage patterns, e.g., personality traits. From August 2017 to October 2018, I was head of the development team for the mobile application, supervising six student assistants.
Publications
2021 | |
Sarah Theres Völkel, Daniel Buschek, Malin Eiband, Benjamin Cowan, Heinrich Hussmann
Eliciting and Analysing Users' Envisioned Dialogues with Perfect Voice Assistants To appear in Proceedings of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '21). ACM, New York, NY, USA.s (bib) |
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2020 | |
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Clemens Stachl, Jiew-Quay Au, Ramona Schödel, Samuel D Gosling, Gabriella M Harari, Daniel Buschek, Sarah Theres Völkel, Tobias Schuwerk, Michelle Oldemeier, Theresa Ullmann, Heinrich Hussmann, Bernd Bischl, Markus Bühner
Predicting personality from patterns of behavior collected with smartphones Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (bib) |
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Sarah Theres Völkel, Penelope Kempf, Heinrich Hussmann
Personalised Chats with Voice Assistants: The User Perspective In Proceedings of the 2nd Conference on Conversational User Interfaces. ACM, New York, NY, USA. (bib) |
Ramona Schödel, Florian Pargent, Jiew-Quay Au, Sarah Theres Völkel, Tobias Schuwerk, Markus Bühner, Clemens Stachl
To Challenge the Morning Lark and the Night Owl: Using Smartphone Sensing Data to Investigate DayâNight Behaviour Patterns European Journal of Personality (bib) |
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Sarah Theres Völkel, Renate Häuslschmid, Anna Werner, Heinrich Hussmann, Andreas Butz
How to Trick AI: Users' Strategies for Protecting Themselves from Automatic Personality Assessment Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '20'), ACM, New York, NY, USA (bib) |
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![]() Developing a Personality Model for Speech-based Conversational Agents Using the Psycholexical Approach Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '20). ACM, New York, NY, USA. (bib) |
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Malin Eiband, Sarah Theres Völkel, Daniel Buschek, Sophia Cook, Heinrich Hussmann
A Method and Analysis to Elicit User-reported Problems in Intelligent Everyday Applications Author pre-print, to appear in Special Issue on Highlights of ACM Intelligent User Interface (IUI)2019. ACM Trans. Interact. Intell. Syst. (bib) |
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Sarah Theres Völkel, Christina Schneegaß, Malin Eiband, Daniel Buschek
What is "Intelligent" in Intelligent User Interfaces? A Meta-Analysis of 25 Years of IUI In Proceedings of the 25th International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces (IUI), Cagliari, Italy (2020) (bib) |
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Beat Rossmy, Sarah Theres Völkel, Elias Naphausen, Patricia Kimm, Alexander Wiethoff, Andreas Muxel
Punishable AI: Examining Users' Attitude Towards Robot Punishment In Proceedings of the 2020 on Designing Interactive Systems Conference (DIS' 20). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA. DOI:http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/3357236.3395542 |
2019 | |
Sarah Theres Völkel, Daniel Buschek, Jelena Pranjic, Heinrich Hussmann
Understanding Emoji Interpretation through User Personality and Message Context To appear in 21st International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services (MobileHCI '19), October 1--4, 2019, Taipei, Taiwan (bib) |
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Sarah Theres Völkel, Ramona Schödel, Daniel Buschek, Clemens Stachl, Jiew-Quay Au, Bernd Bischl, Markus Bühner, Heinrich Hussmann
Opportunities and Challenges of Utilizing Personality Traits for Personalization in HCI: Towards a shared perspective from HCI and Psychology To appear in Augstein, Mirjam, Herder, Eelco, and Wörndl, Wolfgang: Personalized Human Computer Interaction (2019). DeGruyter Oldenbourg (bib) |
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Clemens Stachl, Jiew-Quay Au, Ramona Schödel, Daniel Buschek, Sarah Theres Völkel, Tobias Schuwerk, Michelle Oldemeier, Theresa Ullmann, Heinrich Hussmann, Bernd Bischl, Markus Bühner
Behavioral Patterns in Smartphone Usage Predict Big Five Personality Traits Submitted, Arxiv Pre-print: https://psyarxiv.com/ks4vd/ (bib) |
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Michael Chromik, Malin Eiband, Sarah Theres Völkel, Daniel Buschek
Dark Patterns of Explainability, Transparency, and User Control for Intelligent Systems In Workshop on Explainable Smart Systems at IUI'19, Los Angeles, California USA, March 17 - 20, 2019. ACM, New York, NY, USA. (bib) |
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![]() When People and Algorithms Meet: User-reported Problems in Intelligent Everyday Applications In IUI '19: Proceedings of the 24th International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces. Los Angeles, CA, USA, March 17 - 20, 2019. ACM, New York, NY, USA. (bib) |
2018 | |
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Niklas Müller, Bettina Eska, Richard Schäffer, Sarah Theres Völkel, Michael Braun, Gesa Wiegand, Florian Alt
Arch'n'Smile: A Jump'n'Run Game Using Facial Expression Recognition Control For Entertaining Children During Car Journeys In MUM '18: Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Multimedia. Cairo, Egypt. November 25 - 28, 2018. ACM, New York, NY, USA. (bib) |
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Michael Braun, Sarah Theres Völkel, Gesa Wiegand, Thomas Puls, Daniel Steidl, Jannick Weiß, Florian Alt
The Smile is The New Like: Controlling Music with Facial Expressions to Minimize Driver Distraction In MUM '18: Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Multimedia. Cairo, Egypt. November 25 - 28, 2018. ACM, New York, NY, USA. (bib) |
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Daniel Buschek, Sarah Theres Völkel, Clemens Stachl, Lukas Mecke, Sarah Prange, Ken Pfeuffer
Experience Sampling as Information Transmission: Perspective and Implications In Ubicomp '18 workshop: Mobile Human Contributions: Opportunities and Challenges. Singapore, October 8, 2018. (bib) |
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Michael Braun, Katharina Frison, Sarah Theres Völkel, Florian Alt, Heinrich Hussmann, Andreas Riener
Beyond Transportation: How to Keep Users Attached When They Are Neither Driving nor Owning Automated Cars? In AutomotiveUI '18: Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Automotive User Interfaces and Interactive Vehicular Applications. Toronto, ON, Canada. September 23 - 25, 2018. ACM, New York, NY, USA. (bib) |
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Sarah Theres Völkel, Julia Graefe, Ramona Schödel, Renate Häuslschmid, Clemens Stachl, Jiew-Quay Au, Heinrich Hussmann
I Drive My Car and My States Drive Me: Visualizing Driver's Emotional and Physical States In AutomotiveUI '18: Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Automotive User Interfaces and Interactive Vehicular Applications. Toronto, ON, Canada. September 23 - 25, 2018. ACM, New York, NY, USA. (bib) |
Sarah Theres Völkel, Wiktoria Wilkowska, Martina Ziefle
Understanding Gender-Specific Motivation and Expectations toward Computer Science In Proceedings of the 2018 Gender & IT Conference. Heilbronn, Germany. May 14 - 15, 2018. ACM, New York, NY, USA. (bib) |
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Sarah Theres Völkel, Ramona Schödel, Heinrich Hussmann
Designing for Personality in Autonomous Vehicles: Considering Individual‘s Trust Attitude and Interaction Behavior In CHI 2018 Workshop “Interacting with Autonomous Vehicles: Learning from other Domains” (bib) |
Ramona Schödel, Jiew-Quay Au, Sarah Theres Völkel, Florian Lehmann, Daniela Becker, Markus Bühner, Bernd Bischl, Heinrich Hussmann, Clemens Stachl
Digital Footprints of Sensation Seeking: A Traditional Concept in the Big Data Era In Zeitschrift für Psychologie (2018), 226, pp. 232-245. Hogrefe Publishing (bib) |
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2015 | |
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Chat Wacharamanotham, Krishna Subramanian, Sarah Theres Völkel, Jan Borchers
Statsplorer: Guiding Novices in Statistical Analysis In CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems Proceedings (CHI 2015), Seoul, Korea, April 18 - 23, 2015. ACM, New York, NY, USA, (bib) |
Research Community
Committees
- AutoUI 2019: Publication Chair
- MuC 2019: Workshop Proceedings Chair
Student Volunteering
- SIGCHI Executive Committee Volunteer 2018
- AutoUI 2017
- MuC 2016
Peer Reviewing
I received two recognitions for Outstanding Reviews for CHI 2019 Papers.
- Conferences: INTERACT 2019, CHI 2019, AutoUI 2018, MobileHCI 2018
- Journals: IxD&A - “Special issue on Future Directions of UX Studies: Learning from Best Practices”
Winterschools
- Winterschool 2019: “From Research to Start-Up” and “Creating and Evaluating AR/VR/MR Systems”
- Winterschool 2018: “HCI Technologies for Augmenting the Human Senses”
Teaching
LMU Munich
- Summer Term 2019: Hauptseminar
- Summer Term 2019: Advanced Topics in HCI (Guest Lecture)
- Summer Term 2018: Advanced Topics in HCI (Guest Lecture)
RWTH Aachen
- Summer Term 2012: Formale Systeme Automaten Prozesse (Tutor)
- Summer Term 2011: Formale Systeme Automaten Prozesse (Tutor)
Theses (Bachelor/Master)
I currently don't have any open topics but if you're interested in my research topics (cf. above), feel free to contact me.Open
project thesis | The PhoneStudy Research App |