Christopher Katins Co-Organized the Reality Mediation Workshop at UbiComp/ISWC 2026

At UbiComp/ISWC 2026 in Shanghai, Christopher Katins was part of the organizing team of the “International Workshop on Reality Mediation: Personalized, Shared, and Connected Realities”.

AI, XR, multimodal sensing, wearables, and cyber-physical infrastructures increasingly shape how people perceive, interpret, and discuss the world around them. While such systems open up new opportunities for accessibility, learning, mobility, and collaboration, they may also fragment shared understanding and raise concerns around manipulation, privacy, safety, and trust. The workshop introduced reality mediation as a unifying lens for these challenges and asked how personalized and mediated experiences can remain intelligible, shareable, and societally grounded.

The half-day program opened with vision talks from the organizers, including one by Christopher, followed by two paper sessions:

• AI-Mediated Interpretation, Judgment, and Shared Reality
• Reality Mediation in Physical Spaces and Human–Robot Interaction

The workshop closed with a joint discussion on the research challenges of reality mediation, working towards a shared vocabulary and research agenda for the community.

The workshop was organized by Takuro Yonezawa, Simon Mayer, Shunichi Kasahara, Jannis Strecker-Bischoff, Christopher Katins, Md Atiqur Rahman Ahad, Anthony Rowe, and Flora Salim.

More information about the workshop and program can be found on the workshop website: https://reality-mediation.github.io/2026/