Professor · Research leader · Adviser

Building responsible AI that people can understand, question and trust.

I lead research and innovation at the intersection of recommender systems, computational user behaviour and trustworthy AI—turning evidence into technologies, organisations and societal impact.

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Full Professor at the University of Bergen and Founder & Director of SFI MediaFutures

150+peer-reviewed publications

NOK 650m+funding secured or co-secured

~NOK 300mMediaFutures ecosystem

ACMDistinguished Speaker

What I do

Research, leadership and advice with real-world consequences

My work connects rigorous behavioural research with responsible technology design, institutional leadership and practical implementation.

Responsible AI research

Study how recommendation, personalization and generative AI shape choices, trust and information environments.

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Research & innovation leadership

Build interdisciplinary teams, partnerships and long-term programmes that move ideas from evidence to field deployment.

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Keynotes & strategic advisory

Help leaders, product teams and public organisations turn complex AI questions into clear, responsible decisions.

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Selected impact

Creating the conditions for responsible innovation at scale

As founder and director of SFI MediaFutures, I conceived and built a national research–industry ecosystem for responsible media technology. The centre’s outputs are collective achievements; my contribution is the vision, consortium, funding, agenda and organisational infrastructure that enable researchers and partners to translate work into tools, pilots and practice.

Innovation & Impact Publication record

25+public tools and demonstrations

20+ yearsacross research and applied innovation

Media · Health · Foodhigh-impact application domains

Internationalacademic and industry partnerships

Profile

Responsible AI grounded in human behaviour

Christoph Trattner is one of Europe’s leading experts and a research and innovation leader in responsible recommender systems, computational user behaviour, and trustworthy AI. With more than 20 years of experience at the intersection of academia, industry, and applied AI innovation, he helps organisations design, evaluate, and govern AI systems that influence human decision-making in high-impact domains such as media, health, food, and consumer behaviour.

He is a Full Professor at the University of Bergen, Director of the Research Centre for Responsible Media Technology & Innovation (SFI MediaFutures), and founder and leader of the DARS research group, Norway’s largest research group on recommender systems. He also leads the Norwegian Computational Behaviour & AI Lab, where interdisciplinary teams develop responsible AI solutions for real-world societal and business challenges. In addition, he is a founding member and board member of NoSoCSS, an interdisciplinary initiative advancing computational social science in Norway and beyond.

Trattner has initiated and led large-scale research and innovation collaborations involving startups, public-sector organisations, and multinational companies across Europe and the United States. As founder and director of SFI MediaFutures, he conceived and built a national research–industry ecosystem that translates responsible AI research into practical technologies for journalism, media production, recommendation, fact-checking, accessibility, and democratic resilience.

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Read the full academic biography

Christoph Trattner is a Full Professor of Information Science at the University of Bergen and a leading European researcher at the intersection of recommender systems, responsible AI, and computational user behaviour. His research investigates how AI systems shape human decisions, preferences, trust, and behaviour, and how such systems can be designed to support healthier choices, trustworthy information environments, and societal benefit.

He is the founder and director of the Research Centre for Responsible Media Technology & Innovation (SFI MediaFutures), a large-scale Norwegian centre for research-based innovation on responsible media technology. He is also founder and leader of the DARS research group, Norway’s largest research group on recommender systems, leads the Norwegian Computational Behaviour & AI Lab, and is a founding member and board member of NoSoCSS, an interdisciplinary initiative advancing computational social science in Norway and beyond. Across these environments, he has built interdisciplinary research teams working across computer science, media studies, psychology, health, and the social sciences.

Trattner’s work focuses on responsible recommender systems, user modelling, personalization, behavioural analytics, AI transparency, human-AI interaction, and trustworthy media and health technologies. A recurring theme across his research is appropriate trust in AI: understanding when, why, and how people should trust algorithmic systems, and designing systems that support informed, critical, and beneficial use rather than blind reliance or rejection.

He has authored more than 150 peer-reviewed publications in leading international journals and conferences, including Nature Food, Nature Sustainability, Communications of the ACM, The Web Conference (WWW), ACM RecSys, and ACM UMAP. His research has received several distinctions, including a Best Paper Award Honorable Mention at The Web Conference and inclusion in ACM Computing Reviews’ Best of Computing for his work on visual recommender systems.

As PI and Co-PI, he has helped secure more than 650 million NOK in competitive research and innovation funding, including SFI MediaFutures, with a total budget of approximately €26 million. His projects combine scientific excellence with industry collaboration and societal relevance, particularly in the domains of responsible media technology, AI-supported journalism, health communication, food recommender systems, and trustworthy personalization.

He holds a PhD, MSc, and BSc, all with distinction, in Computer Science and Telematics from Graz University of Technology. His academic career includes appointments at Graz University of Technology, the University of Pittsburgh, and the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, as well as visiting research stays at Yahoo! Labs Barcelona and CWI Amsterdam. He is a former fellow of the Austrian Research Promotion Agency, the Marshall Plan Foundation, and ERCIM.

Trattner is an ACM Senior Member and ACM Distinguished Speaker. He has served as senior program committee member for leading conferences including ACM RecSys, SIGIR, and UMAP, co-chaired international workshops such as HealthRecSys and MSM, and served as program co-chair for MMM 2023. He also serves on the editorial boards of Online Social Networks and Media and AI and Ethics, and advises innovative startups including preforma and caneat.

His overarching goal is to advance AI systems that are not only technically powerful, but also trustworthy, transparent, human-centred, and beneficial for society.

Core themes

Responsible AIRecommender systemsUser behaviourTrust & transparencyMedia technologyHealth & food AI

Recent activity

Latest news

05/2026

Happy to share that our SFI MediaFutures paper “Explanations for Recommended Low-Interest News Articles Fail to Persuade Selective News Avoiders” with Svenja Lys Forstner and Alain D. Starke has been accepted at the INRA workshop at ACM UMAP 2026 in Gothenburg.

04/2026

Great news to share: our paper “Impact of a Prototype Combining Recommender Functionality with Structured Documentation on Operator Performance in Calls to Medical Communication Centers: A Quasi-Experimental Feasibility Study” has been published. The work explores how recommender-based decision support can contribute to medical communication and emergency primary care. Link

04/2026

Very happy to share that two new Research Council of Norway mobility projects connected to SFI MediaFutures and the University of Bergen have been awarded: CuratedAI, focusing on AI transparency, media literacy and appropriate media trust, and VaccAI, focusing on trustworthy health communication and vaccine beliefs in Norway and Ukraine. Together, the projects represent NOK 17.1 million in funding.

03/2026

Very happy to share that two of our full papers have been accepted at ACM UMAP 2026: “Increasing Editor Trust in News Personalization Systems with Fact-checked Large Language Models” and “Using AI as a Chef: Users Overlook Nutritional Flaws in LLM-Generated Recipes”. Both papers are led by my research assistants Tobias Jovall Wessel and Yelyzaveta Lysova as first authors, together with Alain D. Starke and myself.

02/2026

Happy to share that I will be on parental leave until mid-June, spending time with my daughter.

01/2026

We are happy to announce NoSoCSS — a new interdisciplinary initiative advancing research at the intersection of computational social science, data, and society: https://nosocss.org/.

Open earlier news archive

[11/2025] I’m excited to share that our paper “C2PA Provenance Labels Increase Trust in Digital News Platforms Across Western Countries” has been accepted (8% acceptance rate this round) for publication at the prestigious ICWSM 2026 conference – The International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media! Pre-Print
[11/2025]My PhD student Ayoub has passed his PhD defense with flying colors. He also got a paper accepted at IEEE Access in the context of his PhD about digital nudges and recommender systems. PDF
[09/2025] Happy to share that I have started up a new lab initative focused on user behaviour & responsible AI. Check it out
[08/2025] Great news, 6 papers in workshops at ACM RecSys 2025 have been accepted for publication and presentation by our PhD and MA students :)
[07/2025] Happy summer holidays :)
[05/2025] Happy to share that "The role of GPT as an adaptive technology in climate change journalism." has been accepted at ACM UMAP 2025 as a full paper. PDF
[05/2025] Happy top share that MediaFutures passed its midway evaluation with flying colors!
[04/2025] Happy to share that "Decoding Global Palates: Unveiling Cross-Cultural Flavor Preferences Through Online Recipes" has been accepted and published Foods journal. PDF
[01/2025] Our paper "Supporting healthier food choices through AI-tailored advice: A research agenda" has been accepted and published in Elsevier's PEC Innovation journal. PDF
[01/2025] Our paper "Evaluating Sequential Recommendations in the Wild: A Case Study on Offline Accuracy, Click Rates, and Consumption" has been accepted at ECIR 2025. PDF
[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!
[2023 - 2012] For older news, check the source code!

Scholarship

Latest publications

Recent work on trustworthy personalization, news, food and human-centred AI.

Complete record

Increasing Editor Trust in News Personalization Systems with Fact-checked Large Language Models. Wessel, T. J., Trattner, C., and Starke, A. D. ACM UMAP, 2026.
Using AI as a Chef: Users Overlook Nutritional Flaws in LLM-Generated Recipes. Lysova, Y., Trattner, C., and Starke, A. D. ACM UMAP, 2026.
C2PA provenance labels increase trust in news platforms across Western countries. Trattner, C., Forstner, S. L., Starke, A. D., and Knudsen, E. AAAI ICWSM, 2026. PDF
Explanations for Recommended Low-Interest News Articles Fail to Persuade Selective News Avoiders. Forstner, S. L., Starke, A. D., and Trattner, C. INRA Workshop at ACM UMAP, 2026.
Impact of a Prototype Combining Recommender Functionality With Structured Documentation on Operator Performance in Calls to Medical Communication Centers: Quasi-Experimental Feasibility Study. Fotland, S. L. S., Berge, A., Zakariassen, E., Midtbø, V., Baste, V., Fonnes, G., Guribye, F., Trattner, C., You, J., and Johansen, I. H. JMIR Formative Research, 2026. PDF
How Digital Nudges Can Be Integrated into AI Systems to Support Healthier Food Choices. El Majjodi, A., Starke, A. D., and Trattner, C. IEEE Xplore, 2025. PDF
Hope, Fear, or Anger? How Emotional Framing in a News Recommender System Guides User Preferences. Eknes-Riple, J., Hua, J., Jeng, J., Starke, A. D., Seddik, K. M. A., and Trattner, C. INRA Workshop at ACM RecSys, 2025. PDF
More of the Same? A Longitudinal Evaluation of Two Similarity-based Approaches in a News Recommender System. Kasangu, G., Starke, A. D., and Trattner, C. INRA Workshop at ACM RecSys, 2025. PDF
Using Large Language Models to ‘Lighten the Mood’: Satirically Reframing News Recommendations to Reduce News Avoidance. Wessel, T., Trattner, C., and Starke, A. D. INRA Workshop at ACM RecSys, 2025. PDF
Evaluating Image Trust Labels in a News Recommender System: Assessing the Impact of Visual Trust Indicators for Images on User Trust and Interpretation. Forstner, S. L., Lysova, Y., Starke, A. D., and Trattner, C. INRA Workshop at ACM RecSys, 2025. PDF