Research
Publications & Reports
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Master's Thesis (in progress): The Clone as Boss - Anthropomorphism Backfire and Blame Attribution in Spatial AR Manager Clones
2026 - 2027What happens when your own manager appears as a photorealistic AI clone, life-size in your room? This thesis runs a 2 (Agent Type: manager clone vs. generic agent) × 3 (Task Type: information sharing, performance feedback, advisory) within-subjects study on Apple Vision Pro, testing whether the trust and presence benefits of personalisation survive the power asymmetry of a real manager–subordinate relationship - or whether the anthropomorphism backfire effect re-emerges and is amplified by photorealism.
The system streams photorealistic avatars to Vision Pro via NVIDIA CloudXR, with a Unity rendering pipeline, LLM dialogue policy, cloned voice synthesis and Firebase state running on a cloud VM. This thin-client / thick-server split is a deliberate bet on the next generation of lightweight AR glasses.
Supervisor: Dr. David Obremski, Chair of Psychology of Intelligent Interactive Systems, Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg.
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Technical Report: A Conversational Model of Texas German
2026A computer program you can hold a conversation with in Texas German, an endangered heritage dialect. Built from the Texas German Dialect Project's transcribed interviews - 435 recordings, 13.6 hours, 177 speakers - by shifting a general-purpose model's existing Standard German competence toward the dialect using 5,233 aligned Standard German / Texas German utterance pairs.
A measurement framework was built before any training: variant-selection rates (un vs. und, hamm vs. haben), case levelling, final-consonant deletion and code-switching are combined into a single distance from real Texas German. The translation stage scores 0.2067 against a human reference of 0.24, versus 0.7931 for the untrained baseline - which is statistically indistinguishable from plain Standard German. The work also documents and repairs serious damage in the previously exported corpus text.
The code is open and reproducible; the trained model has deliberately not been published, pending the TGDP's view on whether consent to linguistic research extends to generative modelling of speakers' voices.
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Bachelor's Thesis: Leveraging Summarizations from LLMs for Enhancing Community Online Deliberation Tools
2024This thesis explores the application of Large Language Models (LLMs) to enhance online community deliberation through various summarization techniques. The study focuses on evaluating the effectiveness of different summarization methods on digital platforms, aiming to improve user experience and interaction in large-scale online deliberations.
Supervisors: Dr. Sebastian Oberdörfer (University of Würzburg), Dr. Min Kyung Lee, and Jonathan Lynn (University of Texas at Austin).
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Peer Review: "The Impact of Type on Children's Social-Emotional Perceptions of Virtual Reality Characters"
2023A detailed peer review of the paper investigating how different VR character types influence children's emotional responses, focusing on character movement and design.
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Paper: Future-proof Mobility Technologies for People with Dementia
2023This paper explores current mobile technologies designed to assist individuals with dementia, emphasizing the need for user-friendly, accessible solutions. It specifically focuses on Smart Prompt, an innovative mobile application that provides practical tools to improve the daily lives of dementia patients.
Awards
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Google European University Challenge - Rank #61
2026Secured spot #61 in Google's pan-European technical challenge, competing against university teams from across the continent.
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Apple Swift Student Challenge Winner - DyLexAid
2025Selected from more than 10,000 global submissions for DyLexAid, an iOS accessibility app that simplifies reading for people with dyslexia. It handles pasted, scanned or uploaded text and improves readability through text simplification, customizable formatting and text-to-speech with synchronized word highlighting.
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Presidential Award for Global Learning - VivaMonarch
2024Awarded the Presidential Award for Global Learning by the University of Texas at Austin for research on Monarch butterflies. I developed VivaMonarch, an Apple Vision Pro app that raises awareness of the Monarch butterfly and its generational migration behaviour, and ran an accompanying tech-focused social media campaign.
As one of the first educational spatial applications on the App Store, VivaMonarch offers an immersive way to explore the migration and life cycle of Monarchs.
