As XR headsets and AI-enabled smart glasses become part of everyday life, personalization is moving beyond the Web into people’s physical surroundings. When it is applied everywhere, each person may perceive a different, system-mediated version of reality: a Personalized Reality. This can make interactions more efficient and information access more equitable. It can also isolate people in fragmented realities and give system designers considerable influence over how people experience the world and each other.
In my dissertation at the Interactions- and Communication-based Systems lab, I investigate how Responsible Ubiquitous Personalization Systems can create beneficial Personalized Realities while mitigating their harmful social and societal effects. I combine conceptual frameworks, technical prototypes and controlled user studies. So far, this includes the RUPS model for describing and analyzing such systems, Mixed Reality prototypes that filter or explain options while shopping or learning board games, and ways to give people control over their personal data using Solid Pods. My current work focuses on multi-user settings, where people share personalized content so that their realities stay connected.
To do this, I draw on the following research areas:
Next to my main PhD topic, I collaborate with colleagues on related research in personalization, privacy and ubiquitous interaction. I am a teaching assistant for multiple lectures (see Teaching) and co-supervise Bachelor’s and Master’s theses.
I am been reviewing for multiple conferences and journals, for more details see Community Service.
For updates on what I’m doing, have a look at the Publications of my colleagues and me, follow me on the Fediverse: https://hci.social/@jannis, or contact me via email: jannis.strecker-bischoff@unisg.ch!
📑 Recent Publications
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Abstract
Personalized experiences within single-user applications have become ubiquitous, yet when multiple people share a physical space, smart environments are either made to adapt to individual user preferences or to stereotypical predefined groups. Hence, mechanisms and design principles are needed to blend and share individual preferences. In this paper, we propose a multi-user music playback scenario and prototype a decentralized application that combines Solid Pods to store users’ music and sharing preferences, and a Mixed Reality application that enables users to blend individual preferences into a collective music experience using smart speakers. We take this exploratory scenario to suggest relevant design dimensions to consider when creating solutions for shared multi-user personalized experiences in smart environments.
Text Reference
Jannis Strecker-Bischoff, Kimberly Garcia, Sven Durrer, and Simon Mayer. 2026. From Me to We: Shared Multi-User Personalized Experiences in Smart Environments. In Companion of the 2026 ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing (UbiComp Companion ’26), October 11–15, 2026, Shanghai, China. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 5 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3798063.3837234
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Abstract
Recent advances in AI, XR, multimodal sensing, wearable interfaces, and cyber-physical infrastructures are expanding the role of Ubiquitous Computing from supporting everyday activities to shaping how people perceive, interpret, and discuss about the world around them. These systems can enable accessibility, learning, mobility, collaboration, and public-space interaction at unprecendented personalization levels, but they may also fragment shared understanding, create asymmetries, and raise concerns around manipulation, privacy, safety, accountability, and trust. This workshop introduces reality mediation as a unifying lens for these emerging challenges. It brings together researchers from across UbiComp's contributing disciplines, including but not limited to HCI, XR, AI, urban computing, mobility, cyber-physical systems, and trustworthy computing, to discuss how personalized and mediated experiences can remain intelligible, shareable, and societally grounded. The workshop aims to develop concepts, design principles, evaluation methods, and research questions for future ubiquitous computing systems that are not only adaptive and intelligent, but also supportive of shared understanding, towards ubiquitous technology that increases societal cohesion rather than undermining it.
Text Reference
Takuro Yonezawa, Simon Mayer, Shunichi Kasahara, Jannis Strecker-Bischoff, Christopher Katins, Md Atiqur Rahman Ahad, Anthony Rowe, and Flora Salim. 2026. International Workshop on Reality Mediation: Personalized, Shared, and Connected Realities. In Companion of the 2026 ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing (UbiComp Companion ’26), October 11–15, 2026, Shanghai, China. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 4 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3798063.3839770
BibTeX Reference
@inproceedings{10.1145/3798063.3839770,
author = {Yonezawa, Takuro and Mayer, Simon and Kasahara, Shunichi and Strecker-Bischoff, Jannis and Katins, Christopher and Ahad, Md Atiqur Rahman and Rowe, Anthony and Salim, Flora},
title = {International Workshop on Reality Mediation: Personalized, Shared, and Connected Realities},
year = {2026},
isbn = {9798400725333},
publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
address = {New York, NY, USA},
url = {https://doi.org/10.1145/3798063.3839770},
doi = {10.1145/3798063.3839770},
booktitle = {Companion of the 2026 ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing},
numpages = {4},
keywords = {reality mediation, personalization, shared reality, XR, trust},
location = {Shanghai, China},
series = {UbiComp Companion '26}
}
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Abstract
Change blindness, the failure to detect substantial changes, is a known phenomenon that demonstrates one of the limits of human visual perception. Generative image models can now synthesize and edit photorealistic scenes on demand, with prompt-level control over the magnitude, semantic category and salience of a change while observers struggle to distinguish their output from real photographs. The availability of such fluid image adaptations brings fascinating possibilities when combined with change blindness, with respect to dataset sizes and a broadening of the range of testable changes. We present BlinkArt, a system which swaps AI-generated peripheral modifications into displayed images precisely during natural blinks. The system can autonomously author changes, producing self-documented visual narratives without hand-crafted prompts. BlinkArt’s approach can serve both as a controlled research paradigm and a gaze-reactive art installation in which the artwork evolves precisely where the viewer is not looking.
Text Reference
Dominik Steinmann, Jannis Strecker-Bischoff, Kenan Bektaş, Jessica Laraine Williams, and Simon Mayer. 2026. BlinkArt: Using Change Blindness For AI-Generated Image Modifications in Artworks. In Companion of the 2026 ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing (UbiComp Companion ’26), October 11–15, 2026, Shanghai, China. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 6 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3798063.3837172