This site is currently under construction.

Research

You can (or will) find a list of my research on this page. This includes published work, calls for theses projects and other opportunities to collaborate.

About Me

I am a doctoral candidate at the Informatics (or Computer Science as Non-Germans would call it) department of the Ludwig-Maximilian-University in Munich and the Usable Security Group of the CODE institute at the University of the Bundeswehr.

I am pursuing my research next to my work at the Center for Digital Technology and Management (CDTM), where I run the add-on study program (Honor's Degree) Technology Management. Together with my colleagues we aim to connect, educate and empower 25 motivated students – future innovators – each semester.

To find out more about me, feel free to have a look at my private website as well.

Theses

Below you find open and ongoing master and bachelor theses I am supervising. If you are interested in any of these topics – or have ideas on your own – feel free to reach out to me.

I am interested in how we can

create more usable blockchain interfaces.
understand the motivation of people using cryptocurrencies.
measure the technology proficiency of people.
assemble effective project teams.

open

Measuring Blockchain Proficiency

Understanding how proficient study participants are with a specific technology is a critical piece of information to interpret user studies in Human Computer Interaction. The goal of this thesis is to develop a measurement instrument to reliably determine the proficiency level of a person with regards to a technology.

ongoing

Towards Usable Blockchain Interfaces – Secure and Usable Transactions for Cryptocurrencies

Comparing long alphanumeric strings is a task that most humans find difficult and error prone – however recent increase in popularity of blockchain systems (e.g. Bitcoin, Ethereum) now requires users to do exactly that when they want to check the address they want to send cryptocurrency to. The goal of this thesis is to investigate how a more usable, a more secure system can be developed that still incorporates the benefits of decentral blockchain systems...

ongoing

Towards Usable Blockchain Interfaces – Effective Presentation of Transaction Status

Contrary to transactions in centralized systems, it is hard to foresee the time cryptocurrency and smart-contract transactions need to complete. The goal of this thesis is to investigate how the status of cryptocurrency transactions can be “best” displayed to users.

ongoing

Towards Usable Blockchain Interfaces – Onboarding Non-Users to Cryptocurrency

Initial engagement with cryptocurrency requires a prior (technical) understanding of the technology, creating an entry barrier. The goal of this thesis is to investigate how novel onboarding strategies affect user experience for users who previously did not engage with cryptocurrency technology.

completed

Towards Usable Blockchain Interfaces – Understanding Seed Phrase Storage in Practice

An increasingly popular method to generate private/ public key pairs for cryptocurrency wallets is Hierarchical Deterministic Key Generation based on a series of random words. These words (mnemonics) can be stored and subsequently used to (re-)generate the original private key file, in case it is lost. The goal of this thesis is to analyze benefits and drawbacks of different practices from an HCI perspective...