What Happens When Design Meets Decision-Making? Reflections on Gender, Diversity & AI at KIT!

We’ve just wrapped up the third annual Gender in Adaptive Design workshop at KIT, and once again, it sparked powerful conversations at the intersection of technology, behavior, and society. From challenging assumptions to opening up new ways of thinking, we explored how gender, diversity, and AI intersect, grounded in perspectives from behavioral economics and information systems.

A huge thank you to everyone who joined us – your energy, openness, and insights made this workshop truly special. Special appreciation goes to our keynote speaker, Brice Corgnet, whose talk “In Bot We Trust: Should We Let Machines Make Critical Decisions?” sparked deep discussion and fresh research ideas. And heartfelt thanks to Brice Corgnet and Zahra Murad for generously sharing their journeys across academic systems in different countries, offering invaluable insights for our young researchers just beginning theirs.

The Gender in Adaptive Design workshop continues to grow as a platform for critical, thoughtful, and collaborative engagement. Here’s to building more inclusive, reflective environments: together.

What a fantastic day at the Tag der offenen Tür at KIT, and what an honor to open the doors of the KD²Lab to the public as part of KIT’s 200-year anniversary celebration!

We had the pleasure of presenting our work on the Future Field Project “Hybrid Adaptive Systems for Better Work and Life”, exploring how intelligent, human-centered technologies can shape the future of work and well-being.
It was incredibly inspiring to see how many curious, thoughtful, and engaged citizens joined us, asked questions, and took a real interest in our research. This kind of exchange is what makes science meaningful and impactful.

Let’s keep building bridges between science and society: here’s to the next 200 years of research at KIT!

Electronic Markets has published the paper "Engaging Citizen Scientists: Designing an Open Research System for Collaborative Problem Exploration". The paper is co-authored by Michael Gau (University of Liechtenstein), Anke Greif-Winzrieth (KIT), Christof Weinhardt (KIT), Alexander Maedche (KIT), and Jan vom Brocke (University of Münster).  

What Drives Career Moves? Insights from Labor Market Modeling

Just wrapped up a thought-provoking seminar at KD²Lab with Prof. Dr. Jed DeVaro from California State University, East Bay! Jed presented his latest research on "Endogenous Career Mobility and Labor-Market Visibility", offering deep insights into how promotions, lateral career moves, and wage dynamics unfold in real-world labor markets. The paper is joint work with Oliver Gürtler, Antti Kauhanen and Joseph Kuehn.

Using data from a large Finnish employer-employee panel, his structural model not only captures these dynamics but does so with impressive accuracy. It was great to see how the model can quantitatively explain the full range of observed labor market patterns.

It was particularly compelling to see how these patterns remain consistent across industries and geographies, and how counterfactual simulations reveal shifts in mobility and wage outcomes as labor-market visibility changes at different job levels.

A big thank you to Jed for sharing his work and to all who joined us for the discussion!

Prof. Dr. Jed DeVaro

Petra Nieken has co-authored a new study, “Where Do I Belong? Prospective Relative Performance Information under High- and Low-Performing Reference Groups,” with Anna Ressi (WHU – Otto Beisheim School of Management), published in The Accounting Review. The paper explores how relative performance information shapes motivation and behavior when employees are compared to different reference groups.

Key insights from the study:

- People adjust performance to fit group norms

- Feeling out of place can lower motivation

- Choosing your peer group can drive ambition

Find the full study here!

How Can We Make Science More Reliable? Lab² Might Have the Answer.

We were thrilled to host Levent Neyse from Berlin at KD²Lab last week!
He introduced us to Lab², a fascinating initiative tackling the replicability crisis through large-scale collaborations like Many-Labs and Many-Analysts. From testing how research decisions are made to promoting transparency and rigor, Lab² is redefining how we think about science.
A big thank you to Levent for the inspiring talk and for advancing the credibility of scientific research. We’re looking forward to potential future collaborations!

Levent Neyse | IZA - Institute of Labor Economics

As part of the Girls’ Day 2025, the workshop ”App Development Made Easy” provided insights into the emerging field of processing and analyzing biosignals captured by sensors from mainstream mobile apps to recognize emotions and design emotion-adaptive apps for daily life of students. The workshop was offered by PhD students from the KIT Institute for Information Systems (WIN) https://www.win.kit.edu). The workshop took place in the Karlsruher Decision And Design Laboratory (kd2lab) (https://www.kd2lab.kit.edu) in tight collaboration with the DFG-funded hashtag#KD2School (https://kd2school.info) and the KIT Future Field 3 „Hybrid Adaptive Systems" (https://lnkd.in/eiy2-ZF8).

Further information is available here: https://lnkd.in/eySCBp67

Social-cue as Nudge to Deter Workplace Sabotage

As part of the "Decision & Design" speaker series organized by Future Field III, Prof. Dr. Subhasish Modak Chowdhury from University of Sheffield (UK) gave a presentation on his recent research on March 18th at 11.30 AM. The lecture took place at KD2Lab and was open to the public. Further information is available at the following link: https://haps.kd2lab.kit.edu/64_178.php

Prof. Maedche gave a talk on February 18th, 2025 at the  University College London Interaction Centre (UCLIC) on Biosignal-Adaptive Systems with a particular focus on supporting remote meetings.    Remote meetings as a modern way of work are widespread due to distributed team setups.  While there are various benefits in terms of time savings, reduced travel costs and emissions, there are also negative outcomes such as a lack of engagement or increased fatigue. Biosignal-adaptive systems that dynamically adapt to users represent a promising solution to improve remote meetings.  As part of this talk, Prof. Maedche presented selected results from research about this exciting topic carried out within the DFG-funded graduate school KD2School and the KIT Future Field III project on Hybrid Adaptive Systems.

This week, we had the pleasure of welcoming the team from the Cognitive Systems Engineering Lab (Prof. Taro KANNO, Yingting CHEN) of the University of Tokyo back to KIT—nearly half a year after their last visit. During their stay, we held several meetings to discuss ongoing research projects and explore new collaboration opportunities. In addition to these discussions, we conducted design workshops on the future of team work and AI as part of our collaborative study, further strengthening our exchange in the fields of human-centered and adaptive systems. Stay tuned for the results!

The aim of the Health Knowledge Foundation is to encourage people to become co-creators of their health. To this end, the foundation provides information on health topics. In an interview, Prof. Mädche provides insights on current research at the human-centered systems lab on personalization and adaptive systems. He emphasizes the importance of personalization in the context of health information that is delivered through information systems. The interview is available in the current brochure “kompetent”

The KD2School Adaptive Systems Talks are an open-to-the-public Christmas event hosted by the KD2School. This year’s topic is:

Biosignals to Bytes – Human Cognition Meets AI Evolution

Featuring talks from Prof. Kopp (University of Bielefeld), Prof. Wilson (University of Nottingham), and Dr. Debus (KIT), a panel discussion, poster slam, and interactive demonstrations.

On July 17, the Dialog Day took place at KIT. It was dedicated to the topic of “Openness and transparency in economics and management” and offered a varied program with numerous opportunities for exchange. Among other things, the participants were able to gain exciting insights into current research projects of our scientific staff. As part of the Young Researcher Talks, Michelle Hörrmann presented the new “Open Science for Human Subjects Research” portal, which will in the future include an Open Science Onboarding Course for researchers at KIT.

The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), , a peer reviewed journal of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), has published a new article titled “Competition and moral behavior: A meta-analysis of forty-five crowd-sourced experimental designs” co-authored by Petra Nieken. The study follows a rigor and innovative open science paradigm: Independent research teams were invited to contribute experimental designs to a crowd-sourced project. In a large-scale online data collection, 18,123 experimental participants were randomly allocated to 45 randomly selected experimental designs out of 95 submitted designs.