Contact Details

Department of Informatics

Hamburg University 

Vogt-Kölln-Straße 30 

22527 Hamburg, Germany

E-Mail: lohmann/_at/_informatik.uni-hamburg.de 

Phone: +49 (0)40 42883 - 2383

Fax: +49 (0)40 42883 - 2385

Find me on:

Supervisors: Prof. Dr. Christopher Habel, Dr. Carola Eschenbach

Research Topic

Current Research Interests 

Human-Computer Interaction, especially audio-tactile virtual maps (How can we create efficient interfaces? Why are they efficient?), see also: VAVETaM Project (LINK)

Spatial Cognition (How do we understand space?)

Natural Language Generation (What do we have to do to make computers produce language?) 

Additional Research Interests

Verbal, graphical, and haptic representational systems in general (How are signs connected to the world? How comes that we know what a map refers to or recognize us on a photograph?) 

Semiotics (especially of pictoral representations like photographs and multimodal representations maps)

Title of the dissertation: Verbal Assistance with Virtual Tactile Maps: A Multi-Modal Interface for the Non-Visual Acquisition of Spatial Knowledge. 

In my project I study the interaction between two representations: Haptically realized maps and verbal language. Virtual tactile maps provided via tactile virtual environments can play an important role as an assistance system for visually impaired people. The project aims for an understanding of the role of internal and external representations of spatial relations. Practically, we evaluated the use of natural language in the multimodal setting and developed a first prototype of a "verbally assisting tactile maps" system.

Short Biography

Kris holds a M. A. in technical-communication from RWTH Aachen. His studies covered communication science as well as mechanical engineering. The title of his final thesis (Magisterarbeit) is "Indexikalität und Evidenz visueller Zeichen. Das Beispiel der Fotografie im Übergang vom analogen zum digitalen Zeitalter". The work was supervised by Prof. Dr. Ludwig Jäger at the Institute für Speech- and Communikation-Science (ISK - Institut für Sprach- und Kommunikationswissenschaft).

Kris successfully defended his dissertation on the 15th of April 2013 after his PhD canditature in the Knowledge and Language Processing Group (WSV) of Hamburg University.

Publications (peer reviewed)

J. Yu, K. Lohmann, and C. Habel (accepted for publication at the HCII 2013, 7th International Conference on Universal Access in Human-Computer Interaction): Using Sonification and Haptics to Represent Spatial Objects: Effects on Accuracy. 

K. Lohmann, J. Yu, M. Kerzel, D. Wang, and C. Habel (2012): Verbally Assisting Virtual-Environment Tactile Maps: A Cross-Linguistic and Cross-Cultural Study. Presented at the First International Conference on Cognitive Systems and Information Processing, CSIP 2012, Beijing, China. To be published in "Foundations and Practical Applications of Cognitive Systems and Information Processing" by Springer. 

K. Lohmann, M. Kerzel, and C. Habel (2012). Verbally Assisted Virtual-Environment Tactile Maps: A Prototype System. In C. Graf, N. A. Giudice, & F. Schmid (Eds.), Proceedings of Spatial Knowledge Acquisition with Limited Information Displays 2012. (pp. 25–30). Online: http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-888. Presented at the Spatial Knowledge Acquisition with Limited Information Displays Workshop 2012, Seeon, Germany. (PDF)

K. Lohmann and C. Habel (2012). Extended Verbal Assistance Facilitates Knowledge Acquisition of Virtual Tactile Maps. Stachniss, C.; Schill, K.; Uttal, D. (Eds.): Spatial Cognition VIII. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Volume 7463 (pp. 299-318) (LINK)

K. Lohmann, C. Eschenbach, and C. Habel (2011). Linking Spatial Haptic Perception to Linguistic Representations: Assisting Utterances for Tactile-Map Explorations. In M. Egenhofer, N. Giudice, R. Moratz, & M. Worboys (Eds.), Spatial Information Theory, Lecture Notes in Computer Science (pp. 328-349). Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer. (LINK)

K. Lohmann (2011). The Use of Sketch Maps as Measures for Spatial Knowledge. In Wang, J., Broelemann, K., Chipofya, M., Schwering, A., Wallgrün, J.O. (Eds.), Proceedings of the COSIT  ’11 Workshop “An Interdisciplinary Approach to Understanding and Processing Sketch Maps”, pp. 45-54. (PDF)

C. Habel, M. Kerzel, and K. Lohmann (2010). Verbal Assistance in Tactile-Map Explorations: A Case for Visual Representations and Reasoning. In K. McGreggor & M. Kunda (eds), Proceedings of AAAI Workshop on Visual Representations and Reasoning (Atlanta, GA, USA), pp. 34-41. The AAAI Press, Menlo Park, CA, USA.  (PDF)

K. Lohmann, M. Kerzel, and C. Habel (2010). Generating Verbal Assistance for Tactile-Map Explorations. In Van der Sluis, J., Bergmann, K., Van Hooijdonk, Theune, M., Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Multimodal Output Generation (MOG 2011), pp. 27-35, Dublin, Ireland. (PDF)