Research Areas
Accessibility
Websites, mobile apps, desktop applications and content should be usable by anybody, regardless of their abilities. This requires that applications and content need to take special needs into account from the start, i.e. in the requirements and design phases. "Special needs" does not only refer to disabilities but also to the changing capabilities (vision, hearing, motor capabilities) in the ageing population. Accessibility needs can be fulfilled in various ways, such as "Design for All" and through systems that adapt to a user's specific needs and preferences. The focus of our research is on self-adapting systems by user preferences.
Team: Zimmermann Flaig Henka Kelle Münster Smirek Stiegler Strobbe
Adaptive eLearning
eLearning platforms offer new opportunities for formal and informal learning settings. We explore adaptation strategies that react to a learner's gaze position (via eye-tracking) and other behavioral metrics. The goal is to provide an open-source Web framework for adaptive learning that works across desktop and mobile platforms.
Team: Zimmermann Schmidt
Automotive
Mobile devices are often used while driving and many car accidents happen because of misused cell phones. The seamless and safe integration of mobile devices into vehicles (keyword: driver distraction, user experience) is one of our research aspects. The vehicles collect a large number of data that can be used to offer new beneficial services and applications. Our goal is to investigate into the technical aspects of how to improve the way we use vehicles today and how future mobility can become more efficient and more fun.
Eyetracking
Eyetracking is a technique which allows gaze tracking. We use it especially in the project AMMS for our research for education and our adaptive eLearning environment.
Team: Zimmermann Schmidt
Large Scale Systems
The social web and huge growth of mobile smart devices dramatically increases the performance requirements for web services. Ultra Large Scales Systems are the systems that are build to meet those requirements. They deal with automatic resource-provisioning, elastic caching and guaranteed response times. Utilized components are proxies, load-balancers, message queues, caches and distributed event systems.
Team: Kriha Fankhauser
Mobile Applications
Our objective is to improve the way of how mobile applications are developed today and make it easier and more efficient to create applications that are cross-platform, deliver high performance, are maintainable, scalable and adapt to the device and context automatically (responsive). Our RemoteUI platform makes it easy to develop compelling, maintainable cross-platform apps and our Web Scaling Frameworks (WSF) are used to create scalable and high performance backend systems for those apps by default.
Team: Gerlicher Thommes Fankhauser
Virtual and Mixed Reality in serious contexts
Technologies for Virtual and Mixed Reality are not only a good match for the entertainment sector, but may also be very valuable in more serious contexts. Examples from a business perspective are product development, production, maintenance, service and marketing, but there are promising approaches for training and education as well. In order to deliver value to such organizations, it's not only about the content, but way more about methods, interfaces and automated pipelines for developing such applications. The focus of our research is to provide generic concepts for reusable and adaptable solutions in these fields.
Team: Vidačković
Performance
Application performance is a fundamental aspect of user experience. It is determined by the combination of device, server and network performance together with application architecture and implementation. Only short application reaction times together with efficient usage of available network resources enable a dynamic user experience.
Team: Kriha Charzinski Fankhauser
Security
As mobile devices conquer more and more of our daily lives, security and privacy are becoming increasingly important. Our objective is to provide the necessary levels of confidentiality, integrity and authenticity of data and services without compromising user experience. Mobile devices allow and require us to turn away from traditional password entry fields and adopt more dynamic, context and situation aware multi-channel methods.
Team: Schmitz Charzinski