Appointment: Johannes Schöning

1 August 2021. Prof. Johannes Schöning studied geoinformatics at the University of Münster in Germany from 2003 to 2007. In 2010, Prof. Johannes Schöning completed his doctorate at Saarland University with a doctoral thesis on spatial user interfaces. After completing his PhD, he worked as a senior researcher at the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) until 2011, before moving to the University College in London as a postdoc. From 2012 to 2016, he was an assistant professor of computer science at Hasselt University in Belgium. Since 2016, he held a Lichtenberg Professorship of the Volkswagen Foundation at the University of Bremen. In Bremen, he has been co-director of the Bremen Spatial Cognition Center (BSCC) and a member of the Technology Centre for Computing Technologies (TZI) board.

Research in human-computer interaction and geoinformatics

Prof. Johannes Schöning’s research interests are at the intersection of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and geoinformatics. His work covers a broad spectrum within computer science, making him very compatible with the existing research areas at the ICS and the HSG. His research focuses on mobile and mixed reality user interfaces, multimodal interaction and AI-supported analyses of large spatial datasets. Prof. Johannes Schöning has published his research findings at renowned conferences in the field (ACM CHI, ACM MobileHCI) and in journals (NATURE, Science, ACM Interactions). Many of his papers have been awarded prizes. He is also interested in using ubicomp technology to improve the quality of life in urban areas. To promote this research, he helped to establish the Intel Collaborative Research Institute for Sustainable Connected Cities together with colleagues from the renowned University College London.

Extensive teaching experience and commitment to young academics

Prof. Johannes Schöning has extensive teaching experience at all levels of study and is able to cover the range of courses at the department in the field of HCI very well and complements it with interdisciplinary topics. He is particularly committed to supporting early career researchers. For example, he participated as a lecturer at the German Student Academy (Deutsche SchülerAkademie) and supports students with non-academic backgrounds.