Tutorial 1 (Morning): The Future of Agentic Applications and User Interfaces

Instructors: Rich Tong and Robert Bismuth

Abstract: Who is actually deciding how much control a person has over an AI agent acting on their behalf — and where is that decision made? Not in a UI, but earlier: in the engineering choices about where a model runs, what data it can see, and how much autonomy it’s given before a human is consulted. Those choices are being made this year, at speed, by teams who rarely think in HCI terms — and by the time they surface as a product, the interaction design is largely locked in.

This tutorial works through five concrete choices every AI deployment makes — how fast to ship versus how much to review, how tightly to couple to one vendor, whether tools share memory or make users re-explain themselves each time, how a system communicates risk in the moment rather than after the fact, and whether it’s sold as a fixed product or built custom — and each one turns out to have a direct, testable effect on trust, error-checking behavior, and how much autonomy a person is willing to hand over.

We will ground this in real adoption data on where and why people push back on AI tools, and argue that resistance tracks a specific, nameable design failure: systems that don’t let a person see or adjust the autonomy they’ve granted. Each of these is grounded in something live: a working “meta-harness” that wraps general AI models with rules and guardrails before they’re allowed to act, and a benchmark showing a small, locally-run model matching a much larger one on real coding tasks — comparable quality, roughly 10x faster, 80x cheaper.

If you study trust, oversight, or agent interaction design, this is a chance to see the infrastructure your theories eventually have to contend with, live, and to push back on it directly.

Instructor Bios

Rich Tong brings over 30 years of enterprise software experience and more than 10 years building AI software at production scale. TNE.ai is his third AI venture — spanning automotive, unmanned aerial vehicles, and now next-generation Enterprise AI Operating Systems with a sovereign core. At Microsoft he served on the Executive Staff as Vice President of Product Management, responsible for Windows, Office, and all Enterprise server products, growing the enterprise business from $49 million to $1.2 billion in revenue in eighteen months. He co-founded Ignition Partners and Qiming Venture Capital, two firms that together manage over $11 billion in assets and were early investors in DocuSign and Xiaomi. He subsequently co-founded Surround.io, an automotive AI venture, acquired by Xevo (formerly UIEvolution), subsequently acquired by Lear Corporation. Rich is the co-author of The Marketing Playbook, the competitive strategy framework now embedded in TNE’s enterprise AI tooling. He works directly with boards, CIOs, and heads of AI at enterprises building next-generation AI infrastructure. Rich holds 13 patents in computer vision, machine-learning, and robotics. He holds an MS in Electrical Engineering from Stanford and a BS EECS summa cum laude from Princeton.

Robert Bismuth is a technology executive and investor whose work spans software engineering, semiconductors, enterprise systems, and the practical application of artificial intelligence, informed by an academic foundation in pure mathematics. A graduate of Swansea University, he was awarded a First Class Honours degree in Pure Mathematics and subsequently undertook postgraduate research in algebraic topology and number theory. During this period, he was also a member of staff in the University’s Civil Engineering Department under Professor Olgierd Zienkiewicz, where, as System Manager, he led the department’s center for pre- and post-processing in finite element analysis. Robert also undertook graduate studies at McMaster University in Canada and the University of Nantes in France. Robert has held leadership positions across a wide range of high technology sectors, including enterprise software, networking systems, semiconductors, hardware platforms, and advanced materials. He has served as President and Chief Executive Officer of multiple technology companies and as a corporate officer within multinational organizations, including Digital Equipment Corporation. In addition to his executive roles, he has been active as an investor and advisor to emerging technology companies, with a focus on the development and deployment of complex systems at scale. He currently serves as President and Chief Executive Officer of Fermat, a company developing high-performance computing systems for large-scale data analytics and artificial intelligence applications. He maintains an active engagement with academia as a Visiting Professor at Swansea University, working with the Computational Foundry and the School of Management to support innovation, research collaboration, and the translation of advanced technologies into practical applications. He also serves on the Industrial Advisory Board of the Computational Foundry and on the Industry Advisory Board of the School of Management. Across his career, Robert Bismuth has combined deep technical understanding with strategic and operational leadership, contributing to the advancement of complex technology systems and their application in industry. Robert also holds 10 international patents in various diverse areas: high speed computation systems, compute server infrastructure, optical volume measurement and global time synchronization.

Tutorial 2 (Afternoon): Designing Mobile and Wearable Sensor-Fused Conversational Agents for Health and Wellbeing

Instructors:
Dr Hansoo Lee (Dyson School of Design Engineering, Imperial College London and Intelligence and Interaction Research Center, Korea Institute of Science and Technology)
Pablo Fonseca (Dyson School of Design Engineering, Imperial College London)
Dr Md Haseen Akhtar (Dyson School of Design Engineering , Imperial College London and IIT Hyderabad)

Abstract: Mobile and wearable devices increasingly collect continuous wellbeing data, including sleep, activity, heart rate, stress, blood glucose, and blood pressure. Yet access to such data does not automatically help people interpret their condition or change behavior. Many health applications remain dashboard-first, presenting charts, thresholds, goals, and alerts while leaving users to decide what a change means and what action should follow.

Conversely, generic LLM-based conversational agents (CAs) can provide fluent advice, but without personal sensor grounding, they cannot detect individualized patterns or provide contextual guidance. This three-hour tutorial teaches participants how to move from passive monitoring to actionable wellbeing dialogue.

Participants examine a dashboard that combines wearable health-data visualization with conversational-agent feedback, then use Wearable Sensor-Dialogue Wellbeing Agent Studio (WSDWAS) to simulate wearables, generate sensor snapshots, configure agent personas and prompt blocks, and compare dialogue styles. Grounded in Positive Computing, the tutorial emphasizes autonomy, competence, privacy, safety, and boundaries between wellbeing support and medical advice.

mobiCHAI’3: 3rd International Workshop on Mobile Cognition-Altering and Cognitive-Augmenting Technologies using Human-Centered AI

Organizers

• Dr. Agnes Gruenerbl (DFKI, Embedded Intelligence, Kaiserslautern, Germany)
• Jan Spilski (Center for Cognitive Science, RPTU Kaiserslautern-Landau, Kaiserslautern, Germany)
• Paul Lukowicz (DFKI, Kaiserslautern, Germany)
• Prof Thomas Lachmann (Center for Cognitive Science, RPTU University of Kaiserslautern-Landau, Kaiserslautern, Germany • lachmann@rhrk.uni-kl.de)

Webpage: https://ai-enhanced-cognition.com/mobichai-26/

MobiCHAI’3 is the third edition of the International Workshop on Mobile Cognition-Altering/Augmenting Technologies (CAT) Using Human-Centered AI. Following two successful events in 2024 and 2025, the focus is shifting from exploring the design space to trustworthy, mission-oriented, and domain-specific mobile and wearable AI systems for cognitive support in real-world contexts.

This time, the focus is on healthcare and other high-stakes areas, including support for surgical preparation and perioperative procedures, monitoring of stress and workload, and cognitive assistance for clinicians and care teams. With special attention to trust calibration in AI-supported decision-making. Contributions from education, work, accessibility, well-being, and everyday life are welcome. The conference addresses an interdisciplinary community spanning Mobile HCI, Ubiquitous Computing, Cognitive Science, Healthcare, AI, Design Research, and the Social Sciences. Key topics include multimodal sensing of cognitive and affective theory, concepts and paradigms; Interactive systems and tools.