Leon Reicherts

Research

The goal of my research is to build tools that augment and "tie into" people's thinking through conversational interactions. I am particularly interested in achieving this by scaffolding people's thought-processes through conversational prompts that are tailored to the type of task and that get the user to "stop and think" at appropriate points [see also CUI 2021 paper]. For example, prompts that get the person to reflect on their decision-making performance for a specific task and to get them to (re-)evaluate and adjust their strategies [CUI 2022 paper]; or prompts that get a user to explore a dataset from different perspectives [TOCHI 2022 paper]. Recently, I have also investigated how such prompting can support people's reflection processes to foster well-being [CHI 2023 paper].
All these prototypes I have designed - most of them together with great collaborators - include some form of conversational user interface (CUI), since I believe the lend themselves particularly well to such "cognitive scaffolding". My general aim is to design these interfaces in a way that they tie into the "inner dialogues" we engage in when analysing or reflecting on something, or when making decisions.
Currently I am exploring (1) how some of these CUIs can be designed to tie into and support people's thought-processes over time (using longitudinal study designs), (2) how they can act as a moderator in a collaborative reflection tasks, as well as and (3) how (on a more general level) large language models can be leveraged for the aforementioned "cognitive tasks" that I am focusing on.

My PhD is funded by the Leverhulme Trust as part of the Ecological Brain Doctoral Training Programme.

My supervisors are Yvonne Rogers and Sam Gilbert. Mirco Musolesi is on my thesis committee.

Brief biography

I completed my bachelor's degree in Information Systems at the University of Fribourg in 2016 and my master's degree in Human-Computer Interaction at UCL in 2018. I subsequently worked with Yvonne Rogers, Licia Capra and Neil Sebire on the VoiceViz project, which was a collaboration between UCLIC and the DRIVE unit at Great Ormond Street Hospital (GOSH).