Short BIO

I am a Full Professor (1404) at the University of Bergen and the Founder and the Center Director of the Research Centre for Responsible Media Technology & Innovation - SFI MediaFutures worth around 26 million EUR in funding and in-kind. I am also the Founder and Leader of the DARS research group at UiB and hold a 10% Research Professor (Forsker I) position in NORCE (NKLM, department of Health) one of Norway's largest research institutions. I have received a PhD (with distinction), an MSc (with distinction) and a BSc in Computer Science and Telematics from Graz University of Technology (Austria). I am an ACM Senior Member and a former Austrian Research Promotion Agency (FFG) fellow, Marshall Plan and European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics (ERICM) fellow and have been working at Graz University of Technology from 2009-2012, the University of Pittsburgh from 2011-2012, the Norwegian University of Science and Technology from 2014-2015, and have been visiting Yahoo! Labs Barcelona in 2014 and CWI Amsterdam in 2015 two times. My research is positioned in the Information Science research field and lies in the intersection of "Behavioral Data Analytics" and "Recommender Systems". Since 2009, I published over 120 scientific articles in top venues about my work and have acquired over 54 million Euros in funding on European and (inter) national level - 30 million as the PI. Examples of outlets where my work has been published includes NATURE Food, NATURE Sustainability, JASIST, EPJ Data Science, UMUAI, WWW, AAAI ICWSM or ACM SIGIR. I am also the winner of several Best Paper/Poster Awards and Nominations, including, the Best Paper Award Honorable Mention at the prestigious CORE A* ranked The Web Conference in 2017. I regularly act as a (senior) PC member on several top-tier - CORE A* ranked - conferences and co-organize or co-chair a number of workshops and conferences. Recent examples include ACM RecSys in 2018 - 2020 (as Workshop/Late-Breaking Results co-chair) and ACM SIGIR 2020 - 2021 (as senior PC). I am a former board member of Media City Bergen, Norway's largest Media Cluster, a board member of preforma, an amazing Norwegian health-tech start-up focused on health for women, an advisor to the company caneat, a fantastic food start-up, and a member of the editorial board of Elsevier's journal on Online Social Networks and Media, the Open Access Journal Future Internet, Frontiers in Big Data, Springer's Journal of Intelligent Information Systems, and Springer's AI and Ethics journal. Since 2009, I have taught over 2000 students in Austria and Norway, in over 35 courses on BSc, MSc, MBA and PhD level about ICT, and I supervised over 35 students on their Master or PhD thesis. Since June 2021, I am an appointed ACM Distinguished Speaker!

Latest News

• [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]
• [12/2020] Happy to announce that we have 7 positions (4PhD+3PostDoc) available in my new research centre MediaFutures (www.mediafutures.no)! God jul :)
• [11/2020] Happy to announce that our paper "Recommender Systems in the Healthcare Domain: State-of-the-Art and Research Issues." co-authored by Tran, T.N.T, Felfernig, A., Holzinger, A. and myself has been accepted for publication in the Journal of Intelligent Information Systems. Here the pre-print! PDF
• [10/2020] Will give a keynote talk at the Cutting Edge Science and Engineering Symposium: Advances in personalised healthcare and wellbeing support technologies organised by CSIRO - OzDHI2020.
• Have been awarded a "Momentum Stipend" at UiB. Momentum is UiB’s flagship development programme for early stage researchers - postdocs, forsker or førsteamanuensis – who wish to pursue an academic career at a research university. Amount: 100,000NOK
• [09/2020] Our proposal "Communicating the environmental impact of plant based recipes" has been accepted by the Alpro foundation :)
• [09/2020] Accepted the Editorial Board invitation to the Open Access Journal - Future Internet.
• [07/2020] Happy holidays :)
• [06/2020] Wow wow wow: Won the SFI - Centre for Research-based Innovation - MediaFutures, with my team! What a day :)))
• [06/2020] Very happy to hear that our work "Visual Cultural Biases in Food Classification", authored by Qing Zhang, David Elsweiler and myself has been accepted in Foods, IF: 3.011. Here the pre-print! PDF
• [06/2020] Have been interviewed regarding our SFI application MediaFutures in the context of a #FakeNews breakfast meeting organised by NCE Media along with the CEO of Schibsted and other important media experts from NRK, TV 2, Tinius Trust, and Faktisk.no. Here the YouTube video.
• [06/2020] Happy to announce that our paper "Visually-Aware Video Recommendation in the Cold Start" co-authored by Mehdi Elahi, Reza Hosseini, Mohammad Hossein Rimaz, Farshad Bakhshandegan Moghaddam and myself has been accepted at ACM Hypertext 2020 in the Blue Sky Ideas Track. Here the pre-print! PDF
• [05/2020] Happy to announce that our paper "Towards Generating Personalized Country Recommendation" with EL Majjodi, A., Elahi, M., EL Ioini, N. and myself as co-authors, has been accepted for publication in ACM UMAP LBRS 2020 :) Here the pre-print! PDF
• [04/2020] Happy to announce that our paper "Towards a Knowledge-aware Food Recommender System Exploiting Holistic User Models" with Cataldo Musto, Alain Starke, Giovanni Semeraro and myself as co-authors, has been accepted for publication in ACM UMAP 2020 :) Here the pre-print! PDF
• [03/2020] Here the data for our paper "Learning to Recommend Similar Items from Human Judgements", due to popular request :) DATA
• [02/2020] Happy to announce that our IKTPLUSS proposal "RE-AIMED: Readjusted responses by use of AI in medical calls" lead by NORCE has been granted by the Norwegian Science Fund!
• [02/2020] Happy to announce our newly established DARS lab! The lab performs cutting-edge research in methods (e.g., AI methods to predict user behavior) and applications (e.g., intelligent user interfaces) in the context of behavioral data analytics and recommender systems. Get more info here: https://dars.uib.no/
• [01/2020] Work with me as a PhD student! Deadline: 29th February 2020. Here the job post!
• [12/2019] Happy holidays :)
• [11/2019] Have been talking at the 1st International ‘Alan Turing’ Conference on Decision Support and Recommender Systems (DSRS-Turing 2019) held at the The Alan Turing Institute, UK.
• [10/2019] Happy to announce that the MediaFutures SFI application "Research Centre for Responsible Media Technology & Innovation" worth around 30 million EUR and which I lead as PI has been submitted successfully to the Research Council Norway :)
• [10/2019] Have been invited by the Center of Nutrition @ UiB to talk about my research on Computational Data Analytics on the Web for better Food Decision Making. Here the slides! PDF
• [08/2019] Happy to announce that my paper with Dietmar Jannach "Learning to Recommend Similar Items from Human Judgements", has been accepted for publication in UMUAI :) PDF
• [08/2019] Happy to have been invited as the keynote speaker for the Third Workshop on Recommendation in Complex Scenarios co-located with RecSys 2019, Copenhagen. Talk Title: Online food recommendations: A complex problem?
• [08/2019] New paper with David Elsweiler, "An Evaluation of Recommendation Algorithms for Online Recipe Portals". PDF
• [07/2019] Invited paper on online food behavior published in NATURE Sustainability :)
• [07/2019] Have been invited as a speaker to the ACM Summer School on Recommender Systems in Gothenburg, Sweden. Looking very much forward to this great event. PhD & MSc students, sign up as long as there are tickets available :)
• [06/2019] Happy to announce that I have joint the editoral board of the Online Social Networks and Media journal.
• [06/2019] Will be giving a keynote speech at the 1st International ‘Alan Turing’ Conference on Decision Support and Recommender Systems (DSRS-Turing 2019) in November 21-22 held at the The Alan Turing Institute, UK.
• [04/2019] With Alain Said and Hanna Schäfer I am organizing a special issue for the UMUAI journal called "Special Issue on Recommender Systems for Health and Wellbeing". Check out the call!
• [04/2019] Our paper "Predicting Movie Popularity and Ratings with Visual Features" has been accepted at the SMAP workshop co-located with ACM UMAP 2019. PDF
• [03/2019] Our paper "Identifying Cross-Cultural Visual Food Tastes with Online Recipe Platforms" has been at AAAI ICWSM. PDF
• [03/2019] Our paper "Exploring the Power of Visual Features for Cold Start Recommendation of Movies" has been accepted at ACM UMAP! PDF
• [03/2019] The Joint Proceedings of the ACM IUI 2019 Workshops co-edited with Parra, D. and Riche, N. are now online! PDF
• [03/2019] This website is now also available under christophtrattner.com!
• [08/2012 - 01/2019] For older news check the source code!

Latest 10 Publications

• The Interplay between Food Knowledge, Nudges, and Preference Elicitation Methods Determines the Evaluation of a Recipe Recommender System. El Majjodi, A., Starke, A., Elahi, M. & Trattner, C., INTRS workshop at ACM RecSys 2023, 2023. PDF
• Topical Preference Trumps Other Features in News Recommendation: A Conjoint Analysis on a Representative Sample from Norway. Knudsen, E., Starke, A. & Trattner, C. INRA workshop at ACM RecSys 2023, 2023. PDF
• Evaluating The Effects of Calibrated Popularity Bias Mitigation: A Field Study. Klimashevskaia, A., Elahi, M., Jannach, D., Sjærven, L., Tessem, A. & Trattner, C. ACM Recsys 2023 LBR, 2023. PDF
• Understanding How News Recommender Systems Influence Selective Exposure. Seddik, K., Knudsen, E., Trilling, D. & Trattner, C. BehavRec workshop at ACM RecSys 2023, 2023. PDF
• "Tell Me Why": Using Natural Language Justifications in a Recipe Recommender System to Support Healthier Food Choices. Starke, A. D., Cataldo, M., Rapp, A., Semeraro, G. & Trattner, C. UMUAI, 2023. PDF
• Designing for Control in Nurse-AI Collaboration During Emergency Medical Calls. Berge, A., Guribye, F., Schmidt Fotland, S., Fonnes, G., Hjulstad Johansen, I., Trattner, C. ACM DIS 2023. Best Paper Award Honorable Mention PDF
• Understanding and predicting cross-cultural food preferences with online recipe images. Zhang, Q., Elsweiler, D. & Trattner, C. Information Processing & Management, 2023. PDF
• Addressing Popularity Bias in Recommender Systems: An Exploration of Self-Supervised Learning Models. Klimashevskaia, A., Elahi, M., Trattner, C. ACM UMAP 2023. PDF
• Towards Attitudinal Change in News Recommender Systems: A Pilot Study on Climate Change. Jeng, H. J., Starke, A., Trattner, C. Persuasion AI workshop at Persuasive 2023, 2023. PDF
• Healthiness and environmental impact of dinner recipes vary widely across developed countries. Angelsen, A., Starke, A. D. & Trattner, C. Nature Food, 2023. PDF

Copyright © 2023 Christoph Trattner (Last updated: August 18th, 2023)