Short BIO
I currently hold the position of Lead Professor (1404) at the University of Bergen, where I also serve as the Founder and Center Director of the Research Centre for Responsible Media Technology & Innovation - SFI MediaFutures, which has secured funding and in-kind contributions amounting to approximately 26 million EUR. In addition, I am the Founder and Leader of the DARS research group, Norway's largest research group specializing in Recommender Systems.
I hold a PhD (with distinction), MSc (with distinction), and BSc in Computer Science and Telematics from Graz University of Technology in Austria. I am an ACM Senior Member and have been the recipient of numerous prestigious fellowships, including those from the Austrian Research Promotion Agency (FFG), the Marshall Plan Foundation, and the European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics (ERICM). My previous academic appointments include positions at Graz University of Technology (2009-2012), the University of Pittsburgh (2011-2012), and the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (2014-2015). I have also held visiting research appointments at Yahoo! Labs in Barcelona (2014) and CWI Amsterdam (2015, twice).
My research focuses on development of new kinds of Responsible AI with a concentration on "Data Science" and "Recommender Systems" areas in which I have published over 150 papers in leading academic venues since 2009. These publications include contributions to NATURE Food, NATURE Sustainability, JASIST, IPM, UMUAI, WWW, AAAI ICWSM, ACM SIGIR, ACM RecSys, etc. I have successfully secured over 650 million NOK in funding for various research initiatives at both the European and international levels, with 30 million EUR as Principal Investigator. Additionally, I have received several Best Paper/Poster Awards and Honorable Mentions, including the Best Paper Award Honorable Mention at the highly regarded CORE A* ranked The Web Conference in 2017.
I actively contribute to the academic community by serving as a senior program committee (PC) member for several top-tier conferences (CORE A* ranked) and by co-organizing and chairing workshops and conferences. Notable examples include serving as Workshop/Late-Breaking Results co-chair for ACM RecSys (2018-2020) and as senior PC member for ACM SIGIR (2020-2021). I am also a former board member of Media City Bergen, Norway's largest media cluster, and currently serve on the board of preforma, a pioneering Norwegian health-tech start-up focused on women's health. Furthermore, I provide advisory services to caneat, an innovative food-tech start-up, and sit on the editorial boards of prominent academic journals, including Springer’s Journal of Intelligent Information Systems and Springer’s AI and Ethics journal.
Since 2009, I have taught over 2000 students across more than 35 courses at the BSc, MSc, MBA, and PhD levels in Austria and Norway, and I have supervised over 35 students on their Master’s or PhD theses. In June 2021, I was appointed as an ACM Distinguished Speaker, one of only two such appointments in Norway.
Latest News
- [10/2024] I’m thrilled to share that three papers lead by our PhD students have been accepted
at the INRA and HealthRecsys workshops in this year's ACM RecSys 2024 conference in Bari!
- [09/2024] Happy to share that our paper "Advancing Visual Food Attractiveness Predictions for Healthy
Food Recommender Systems" has been accepted at the HealthRecsys workshop at ACM RecSys 2024.
- [08/2024] Our paper "Examining the merits of feature-specific similarity functions in the news domain using human judgments" has been published in Springer's UMUAI journal. PDF
- [07/2024] Happy holidays :)
- [06/2024] Fantastic to hear that our MediaFutures PhD candidate Anastasiia Klimashevskaia has gotten a Level 2 journal (highest journal ranking in Norway) accepted based on her PhD work.
- [06/2024] In total, we got 4 papers accepted at ACM UMAP 2024! Read the news here :)
- [04/2024] Nice to hear that our Workshop proposal on Health Recommender Systems with Helma Torkamaan, Hanna Hauptmann and myself as organisers has been accepted at ACM Recsys 2024 as a full day workshop! Stay tuned for the call for papers :)
- [03/2024] Great to hear that our paper "Shaping the Future of Content-based News Recommenders Insights from Evaluating Feature-Specific Similarity Metrics" with our MA student Daniel Roses as first author and co-authored/supervised by Alain Starke and myself has been accepted to ACM UMAP 2024 as a Full Paper!
- [02/2024] Great to hear that our MediaFutures: Research Centre for Responsible Media Technology & Innovation opinion paper co-authored by Nick Diakopoulos, Christoph Trattner, Dietmar Jannach, Irene Costera Meijer and Enrico Motta, entitled "Leveraging Professional Ethics for Responsible AI: Applying AI techniques to journalism." is finally online and published in Communications of the ACM! PDF
- [01/2024] Happy new year!
- [09/2023] A nice example of an interdisciplinary MediaFutures: Research Centre for Responsible Media Technology & Innovation success story! Happy to share that our paper „Topical Preference Trumps Other Features in News Recommendation: A Conjoint Analysis on a Representative Sample from Norway“ with Erik Knudsen as lead author and Alain Starke and myself as-coauthors, has been accepted at INRA at ACM Recsys 2023! PDF
- [08/2023] Great to hear that our DARS research group PHD candidate Ayoub El Majjodi got a paper accepted at the IntRS workshop held at ACM RecSys 2023! Congrats to you. PDF
- [08/2023] Happy to hear the news that our NewsRec/MediaFutures: Research Centre for Responsible Media Technology & Innovation PhD student Khadiga Seddik has gotten her first paper accepted at the BehavRec workshop at the flagship conference on Recommender Systems, ACM Recsys 2023, in Singapur. Congrats to Khadiga and her PI Erik Knudsen, and co-author Damian Trilling. PDF
- [08/2023] Happy to hear about the acceptance of two papers! Paper number one: A MediaFutures: Research Centre for Responsible Media Technology & Innovation paper led by PhD candidate Anastasia Klimashevskaya and in collaboration with TV 2, the University of Klagenfurt, and Universitetet i Bergen.
Paper number two: A DARS research group paper led by Alain Starke and co-authors from the University of Bari, the University of Torino, and UiB. Both paper got accepted in the flagship journal (UMUAI) and conference on recommender systems (ACM RecSys 2023) research, and report on latest findings in the context of (1) NLP justifications in food recommender systems and (2) and a field experiment on popularity bias mitigation. Congrats to these amazing international research teams. Paper 1 Paper 2
- [07/2023] Happy to share the publication of our latest research in the context of food recommender systems and cross-cultural visual preferences! PDF
- [07/2023] Nice holiday gift :) My PhD student Arngeir berge has received an award at ACM DIS this year for his outstanding PhD work on medical AI. Congrats to you! PDF
- [06/2023] "Designing for Control in Nurse-AI Collaboration During Emergency Medical Calls" accepted for publication at ACM DIS 2023. PDF
- [06/2023] "Addressing Popularity Bias in Recommender Systems: An Exploration of Self-Supervised Learning Models" to be presented at ACM UMAP 2023 available for download. PDF
- [06/2023] "Healthiness and environmental impact of dinner recipes vary widely across developed countries" published in NATURE Food. PDF
- [05/2023] "Trustworthy journalism through AI" published in Elsevier's Data & Knowledge Engineering journal. PDF
- [04/2023] Happy to hear that our MediaFutures: Research Centre for Responsible Media Technology & Innovation PhD student Jia-hua Jeng has gotten his first paper together with Alain Starke and myself as co-authors accepted at the Persuasion AI workshop held at https://persuasivetech.org. The title of the paper is „Towards Attitudinal change in news recommender systems: A pilot study on climate change news“.
- [03/2023] Cool to hear that our workshop proposal on recommender systems for behavioral change has been accepted at ACM Recommender Systems conference 2023 in Singapur. Stay tuned for the call for papers :)
- [02/2023] Very happy to hear that our PhD candidate Arngeir Berge at Institutt for informasjons- og medievitenskap in the IKTPLUSS project Re-Aimed, has been invited to present his excellent work on AI and health interfaces entitled "Human-Driven Clinical Assessments: Telephone Triage Supported by Artificial
Intelligence" at the ACM CHI'23 workshop on Intelligent Data-Driven Health Interfaces! Happy supervisor day.
- [01/2023] Very happy to hear that our paper "Examining the User Evaluation of Multi-list Recommender Interfaces in the Context of Healthy Recipe Choices," co-authored by Alain Starke, Edis Asotic, Ellen van Loo and myself has been accepted for publication in ACM Transactions on Recommender Systems. PDF
- [12/2022] Great news before the vacation start today! Our MediaFutures: Research Centre for Responsible Media Technology & Innovation paper „Visual User-Generated Content Verification in Journalism: An Overview" has been accepted for publication in IEEE Access. Congrats to PHD student Sohail Khan as lead author, and his co-authors. PDF
- [11/2022] Check out our special issue on recommender systems for health and
well-being published in Springer's UMUAI journal. PDF
- [10/2022] In the Norwegian news about our work on responsible media tech!
- [09/2022] Proud to share that two papers have been accepted at workshops held at ACM Recsys 2022 from our research group and centre :) Congrats to Giovanni Castiglia, Ayoub El Majjodi, Federica Calò, Yashar Deldjoo, Lucio Narducci, Alain Starke and myself for their paper "Nudging Towards Health in a Conversational Food Recommender System Using Multi-Modal Interactions and Nutrition Labels" and Alain Starke, Ayoub El Majjodi and myself for their paper "Boosting Health? Examining the Role of Nutrition Labels and Preference Elicitation Methods in Food Recommendation". Pre-prints will follow!
- [07/2022] Time for some time off! Happy summer holidays all :)
- [07/2022] Happy to announce that we have a PhD position available in User Modelling, Personalisation & Engagement in my research and innovation centre MediaFutures! Happy summer holidays :)
- [06/2022] Have been interviewed by the Bergen Chamber of Commerce and Industry about the importance of developing responsible media technology. Here the article including some quotes from me (in Norwegian). Link
- [05/2022] Our book chapter on „Food Recommender Systems“ authored by David Elsweiler, Hanna Hauptmann and myself, and published in the well-known Recommender Systems Handbook edited by Ricci et al. in Springer is finally out! PDF
- [04/2022] Great to hear that our journal submission „Considering Temporal Aspects in Recommender Systems: A Survey“ with Veronika Bogina, Tsvi Kuflik, Dietmar Jannach, Maria Bielikova, Michal Kompan and Christoph Trattner as co-authors has been accepted for publication in User Modeling and User-Adapted Interaction (IF: 4.8, Level: 2 In Norway). Congrats to the team and Veronika as main author and her supervisor Tsvi in particular!
- [04/2022] Happy to hear that my PhD student Ayoub El Majjodi has gotten his first full paper accepted at ACM UMAP 2022. Congrats to Ayoub and his fantastic co-supervisor Alain Starke. PDF
- [02/2022] So proud of our MediaFutures: Research Centre for Responsible Media Technology & Innovation PhD candidate Anastasia Klimashevskaya and the team around her from TV 2 and Universitetet i Bergen to see her first paper accepted at the BIAS WS @ ECIR 2022 as the main author! Congrats - Pre-print out soon :)
- [01/2022] Happy to hear that our DARS research group paper „Developing and Evaluating a University Recommender System“ has been accepted for publication in Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence, section AI for Human Learning and Behavior Change. Authors: Meh Di, Alain Starke, Nabil El Ioini, Anna Alexander Lambrix, Christoph Trattner. Congrats to this fantastic team! PDF
- [12/2021] Happy to share that our opinion paper on the MediaFutures: Research Centre for Responsible Media Technology & Innovation vision has been published in Springer Nature's AI & Ethics journal! PDF
- [11/2021] Great news! A MediaFutures publication entitled „Hybrid Recommendation of Movies based on Deep Content Features“ co-authored by Tord Kvifte, Meh Di and Christoph Trattner has been accepted at The 2nd International Workshop on AI-enabled Process Automation.
- [10/2021] Awesome collaboration! A MediaFutures publication entitled "Towards Responsible Media Recommendation" co-authored by Elahi, M., Jannach, D., Skjærven, L., Knudsen, E., Sjøvaag, H., Tolonen, K., Holmstad, Ø., Pipkin, I., Throndsen, E., Stenbom, A., Fiskerud, E., Oesch, A., Vredenberg, L. and Trattner, C. has been published in Springer Nature's AI & Ethics journal. Here the pre-print! PDF
- [09/2021] Very nice news! A MediaFutures publication entitled "Predicting Feature-based Similarity in the News Domain Using Human Judgments" co-authored by Alain Starke, Sebastian Øverhaug Larsen and myself has been accepted for publication at the News Recsys workshop at the ACM Recommender Systems conference 2021. Here the pre-print! PDF
- [08/2021] Happy to hear that our paper "The Cholesterol Factor: Balancing Accuracy and Health in Recipe Recommendation Through a Nutrient-Specific Metric" co-authored by Alain Starke, Hedda Bakken, Martin Johannessen, Vegard Solberg, and myself has been accepted at the Multi-Objective Recommender System Workshop at the ACM Recommender Systems conference. PDF
- [07/2021] Accepted membership to the board of Media City Bergen AS (MCB).
- [07/2021] There are two positions (PhD & PostDoc) available in my research centre :) One is on Recommender Systems and the other one is the context of Computational Social Sciences. Please apply or share! Deadlines are in August 2021. Link
- [07/2021] Have been interviewed by Dagbladet (db.no) about algorithms used in online video streaming platforms such as Netflix in the context of an article they have been writing up. Here the article including some quotes from me (in Norwegian). Link
- [07/2021] Happy to share that "Serving Each User: Supporting Different Eating Goals Through a Multi-List Recommender Interface" has been accepted at ACM RecSys 2021 (acceptance rate 18.4%). Here the pre-print! PDF
- [07/2021] Wow, have been appointed ACM Distinguished Speaker by the president of the ACM for the next 3 years. "ACM’s Distinguished Speaker Program (DSP) is a highly visible way for ACM members to engage with emerging professionals, students and, in some cases, the public on a range of topics in computing." [ACM]
- [06/2021] Happy to share the good news that the Research Council of Norway funded our project "The Double-edged Sword of News Recommenders’ Impact on Democracy (NEWSREC)". Amount: 8,000,000NOK (4 years).
- [06/2021] Happy to share that the Board of the University of Bergen promoted me to Professor 1404 in the meeting on June 17, 2021.
- [06/2021] Accepted the editorial board invitation for Springer's Journal AI and Ethics!
- [05/2021] Happy to announce that our paper Recommending Videos in Cold Start with Automatic Visual Tags is now online. PDF
- [05/2021] Accepted the editorial board invitation for the Journal of Intelligent Information Systems!
- [04/2021] Accepted the editorial board invitation for the Journal Frontiers in Big Data - Section: Recommender Systems!
- [03/2021] Exploring the Effects of Natural Language Justifications on Food Recommender Systems with Cataldo Musto, Alain Starke, Amon Rapp, Giovanni Semeraro and myself has been accepted at ACM UMAP'21 as a full paper. Here the pre-print! PDF
- [03/2021] Happy to share that "Exploring Multi-List User Interfaces for Similar-Item
Recommendations" has been accepted at ACM UMAP 2021. Here the pre-print! PDF
- [03/2021] Happy to share that 4 new papers on food recommender systems and search are out, see publications :)
- [02/2021] Happy to share that I have been promoted to Full Professor :)
- [01/2021] Happy to share that www.mediafutures.no is online :)
- [01/2021] Happy to share that I have been awarded ACM Senior Member grade. "The Senior Members Grade recognizes those ACM members with at least 10 years of professional experience and at least 5 years of Professional Membership in the last 10 years, who have demonstrated performance through technical leadership, and technical or professional contributions!"[ACM]
- [2020 - 2012] For older news, check the source code!
Latest 10 Publications
- Empowering Editors: How Automated Recommendations Support Editorial Article Curation. Klimashevskaia, A., Elahi, M., Jannach, D., Trattner, C. & Buodd, S. INRA Workshop at ACM Recsys 2024, 2024. PDF NEW!
- Negativity Sells? Using an LLM to Affectively Reframe News Articles in a Recommender System. Jeng, J., Kasangu, G., Starke, A., Knudsen, E. & Trattner, C. HealthRecsys Workshop at ACM Recsys 2024, 2024. PDF NEW!
- Advancing Visual Food Attractiveness Predictions for Healthy Food Recommender Systems. El Majjodi, A., Khan, S., Starke, A., Elahi, M. & Trattner, C. INRA Workshop at ACM Recsys 2024, 2024. PDF NEW!
- Examining the merits of feature-specific similarity functions in the news domain using human judgments. Starke, A., Solberg, V., Øverhaug, S. and Trattner, C. UMUAI, 2024. PDF
- A Survey on Popularity Bias in Recommender Systems. Klimashevskaia, A., Jannach, D., Elahi, M. and Trattner, C. UMUAI, 2024. PDF
- Shaping the Future of Content-based News Recommenders: Insights from Evaluating Feature-Specific Similarity Metrics. Rosnes, D. Starke, A. & Trattner, C. ACM UMAP 2024, 2024. PDF
- Incorporating Editorial Feedback in the Evaluation of News Recommender Systems. Mahmood, B. Elahi, M., Touileb, S., Steskal, L. & Trattner, C. ACM UMAP 2024 LBR, 2024. PDF
- Perception versus Reality: Evaluating User Awareness of Political Selective Exposure in News Recommender Systems. Starke, A., Sandvik, A., Knudsen, E., Trilling, D. & Trattner, C. ACM UMAP 2024 Workshops, 2024. PDF
- Emotional Reframing of Economic News using a Large Language Model Conference. Jeng, J., Kasangu, G., Starke, A. & Trattner, C. ACM UMAP 2024 Workshops, 2024. PDF
- Leveraging Professional Ethics for Responsible AI: Applying AI techniques to journalism. Diakopoulos, N., Trattner, C., Jannach, D., Costera Meijer, I. and Motta, E. Communcations of the ACM, 2024. PDF