“Digital security should not be annoying”

As we dash through an airport, we pass by static advertising screens and flight boards, but also interactive displays. However, most travelers do not realize this – and pass on by accordingly. One of the research questions of Florian Alt concerns how to design such screens in public spaces so that people actually notice and interact with them.

Since 2024, Alt has been Chair Professor of Media Informatics at LMU – and has set his sights on much more than technology: “I’m interested in human behavior, attention, and trust in modern technological tools,” he says, “and the design question of how to achieve intuitive interactions between users and technologies.”

He has been fascinated by the interplay of humans and technology since the dawn of his discipline. In 2001, he was among the first batch of students to take the new media informatics course at LMU. He wrote his degree thesis, titled An Annotation Platform for the World Wide Web, at the Fraunhofer Institute for Intelligent Analysis and Information Systems in Bonn. In this project, he developed a platform that facilitates the annotation of websites by their visitors and makes these annotations accessible to other users.

Research in middle of everyday life

After one-and-a-half years in the United States – without definite academic plans, as he now relates – Alt returned to Germany at the prompting of his subsequent doctoral supervisor. He began his PhD at the University of Duisburg-Essen and completed it at the University of Stuttgart. His dissertation centered on the question of how to design interactive displays in public spaces. He would then further pursue this topic as part of an EU-funded research project.

During his doctorate, he worked for several months in Telekom Innovation Laboratories (the R&D department of Deutsche Telekom) at TU Berlin. “I think it’s important that research is not conducted only under the artificial conditions of a laboratory, but in real life,” explains Alt. “For example, a display I developed was installed in the window of a Deutsche Telekom store in the Hackescher Markt area of Berlin, in order to research how the interactivity of such displays can be communicated to passersby. When people didn’t understand what they were looking at, they just kept walking – you cannot get more honest feedback than that.” In 2013, he made his first return to LMU – as junior professor of media informatics. While here, he was awarded funding of 1.2 million euros in 2016 by the Bavarian State Ministry for Education and Culture, Science and the Arts for a research project on behavior-based authentication.

In 2018, he moved to the University of the Bundeswehr Munich, where he worked in an interdisciplinary team at the CODE research institute at the interface between IT security and human-computer interaction – and deliberately steered his research in the direction of the design of novel user interfaces for IT security and social engineering.

Smartwatch alerts

In 2024, he accepted a chair at LMU. A topic that fascinates him is people’s emotional states in security-relevant situations: “I’m curious about how people behave in complex digital situations – under time pressure and while being manipulated by increasingly more professional attackers – in the case of phishing emails for instance.” It is precisely in such moments that people are vulnerable to attacks. Alt’s approach: “Security should not be thought of as an add-on, but must be part of the design from the start – embedded in the natural flow of user interaction.”

However, the onus for security must not just be shifted on to users. Instead of relying on pop-up warnings and password rules, Alt favors systems that think situationally in the background: “Typing behavior, eye movement, or even physiological signals like pulse or skin conductance can provide indicators as to whether the right person – the owner, say – is currently using the device.” If not, then the system can ask for a password – but only does so in such cases.

In addition, his team is working on systems that can recognize specific attacks – such as fraudulent deepfake calls or phishing emails: “Perhaps the recipient’s smartwatch registers that their pulse is getting faster; they are stressed. In conjunction with further characteristics – say, that a call has been received from an unknown number and the banking app has been opened – there is a certain probability that attempted fraud is taking place.” The key question then becomes: “How do I intervene in real time?” One possibility is a discreet alert on the person’s smartwatch suggesting a useful defense strategy.

Security prompts only when grounds for suspicion

Alt wants a paradigm shift away from security as an obstruction and toward security as an invisible companion – adaptable, capable of learning, and as inobtrusive as possible. “Multifactor authentication is annoying when it constantly pops up,” says Alt. “But when such queries only appear when there’s a specific threat and the reason is communicated, users tend to accept them – because the rationale is clear and the messages are not bothering people all the time.”

Timing is crucial here. “If you’re trying to urgently book a train ticket, you don’t want to have to think up new passwords.” In quieter moments, by contrast – while commuting, for example, or waiting at a bus stop, when people have their devices in their hand, but have no urgent tasks to do – their willingness is greater to deal with a security task. “The key is to recognize such opportune moments – and make sensible use of them.”

In view of these challenges, Alt’s research has a strong interdisciplinary bent, combining psychology, IT security, pedagogy, language processing, and machine learning. In cooperation with the Munich Center for Machine Learning, security agencies, and companies like Google, he looks for ways to make security mechanisms more intelligent and adaptable – and to support users without overwhelming them.

Public displays are reemerging as a growing focus of Alt’s research, including in the context of IT security. “In shared spaces such as an office kitchenette, they can be used to communicate knowledge concerning IT security and promote discussion about the topic between colleagues,” says Alt.

He is organizing the ACM Symposium on Pervasive Displays, which will be held in Munich in March 2026. This will see experts in this research field meet up at LMU to present their latest research results and talk about the future of interactive displays.