Research programme

Responsible AI shaped around people and society

I study how AI systems influence what people see, choose and trust—and how they can be designed to strengthen agency, well-being and democratic life.

View publications Explore the research initiative

Responsible AIRecommender systemsHuman behaviourTrust & transparency

Media & democracyTrustworthy information, provenance and news recommendation

Health & foodDecision support, behaviour change and responsible advice

Digital platformsPersonalisation, bias, agency and long-term effects

Research vision

From predicting behaviour to designing AI that deserves appropriate trust

My work connects computational modelling, behavioural theory and human-centred evaluation. The goal is not only to make AI systems more accurate, but to understand how they affect people and institutions—and to build alternatives that are transparent, useful and socially responsible.

Across media, health and digital platforms, I examine how recommendation, personalisation and generative AI shape attention, preferences, decisions and trust. This includes controlled experiments, prototype studies, field collaborations and long-term evaluation with academic, industry and public-sector partners.

Core research areas

Three connected domains

Different application areas, united by the same question: how can AI influence behaviour without undermining human agency or societal values?

Study interface illustrating provenance information for digital news

Media, news & democracy

Trustworthy information environments

Responsible news recommendation, AI-supported journalism, misinformation, provenance, usable transparency, selective exposure and news avoidance.

Current question: When do explanations, labels and reframing help people engage with news—and when do they fail?

Research figure comparing the healthiness and environmental impact of recipes

Health, food & behaviour

Better choices without overclaiming

Food and health recommender systems, digital nudging, cross-cultural behaviour, sustainability, health communication and AI-generated advice.

Current question: How can AI support healthier decisions while preserving autonomy and communicating uncertainty?

Research figure about popularity bias in recommender systems

Recommenders & platforms

Beyond short-term engagement

Personalisation, popularity bias, diversity, long-term user experience, platform behaviour and human–AI interaction.

Current question: How should systems balance immediate relevance with curiosity, diversity, learning and long-term value?

Research approach

How the work moves from question to impact

Understand behaviourModel how people interact with recommendations, content, interfaces and AI-generated information.

Design alternativesDevelop algorithms, explanations, labels, interfaces and interventions grounded in human needs.

Evaluate with peopleUse experiments, user studies, simulations, field studies and longitudinal methods.

Translate into practiceWork with media, health and public-sector partners to test usefulness in real settings.

Current programme

Research leadership and active directions

Selected programmes through which the research agenda is developed with teams and external partners.

SFI MediaFutures

Large-scale research–industry collaboration on responsible media AI, newsroom tools, recommendation, verification and democratic resilience.

Founder & Centre Director

CuratedAI

Research on AI transparency, media literacy and appropriate trust in increasingly AI-mediated information environments.

Principal Investigator

VaccAI

Trustworthy health communication and vaccine beliefs, connecting computational analysis with behavioural and societal questions.

Principal Investigator

Recommender systems & behaviour

Long-term work on diversity, news avoidance, healthy choices, human–AI interaction and evaluation beyond accuracy.

DARS & interdisciplinary collaborations

Selected evidence

Recent work that represents the agenda

View full publication record →

Interface used to study C2PA provenance labels in news

AAAI ICWSM · 2026

C2PA provenance labels increase trust in news platforms across Western countries

Cross-country evidence on how source and provenance information can support trust in digital news environments.

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Preview of research on editor trust in news personalisation

ACM UMAP · 2026

Increasing editor trust in news personalisation systems with fact-checked large language models

Research connecting recommender-system design with editorial judgment, verification and appropriate professional trust.

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Research figure on AI-tailored advice for healthier food choices

PEC Innovation · 2025

Supporting healthier food choices through AI-tailored advice

A research agenda for responsible, personalised systems that support healthier decisions without reducing people to optimisation targets.

Publication →

Track record

Selected funding and recognition

The highlights below keep the focus on the current programme; the full historical record remains available in the expandable archives.

Selected major grants

CuratedAI and VaccAI — Research Council of Norway, 2026
Reynir — Agenda Vestland, 2024
NEWSREC — Research Council of Norway, 2021
SFI MediaFutures — Research Council of Norway, 2020–2028
RE-AIMED — Research Council of Norway, 2020

View complete grant history

2026: Research Council of Norway — CuratedAI: AI transparency, media literacy and appropriate media trust. Part of a combined 17.1 MNOK mobility project award connected to SFI MediaFutures and the University of Bergen. PI.
2026: Research Council of Norway — VaccAI: Trustworthy health communication and vaccine beliefs in Norway and Ukraine. Part of a combined 17.1 MNOK mobility project award connected to SFI MediaFutures and the University of Bergen. PI.
2024: Agenda Vestland — Reynir: Combatting misinformation with joined forces. Amount: 10,000,000 NOK, 2 years. Co-PI.
2021: Research Council of Norway — The Double-edged Sword of News Recommenders’ Impact on Democracy (NEWSREC). Amount: 8,000,000 NOK, 4 years. Co-PI.
2020: Research Council of Norway — MediaFutures: Research Centre for Responsible Media Technology & Innovation. Amount: approximately 26,000,000 EUR, 8 years. PI / Centre Director.
2020: Alpro Foundation — Communicating the environmental impact of plant-based recipes. Amount: 49,000 EUR, 1 year. PI.
2020: Research Council of Norway — RE-AIMED: Readjusted responses by use of AI in medical calls. Amount: 15,975,000 NOK, 4 years. PI.
2019: European Union — Interdisciplinary connectivity: Understanding and managing complex systems using connectivity science. Amount: 4,030,279 EUR, 4 years. Co-Investigator.
2018: Research Council of Norway — ITS for sustainable TRANSport: In-vehicle FEEDback on eco-driving and external costs. Amount: 6,700,000 NOK, 4 years. Co-Investigator.
2018: Research Council of Norway — Investigating the impact of Artificial Intelligence on Journalism’s Social Contract: Issues of Machine Ethics in Modern Journalism. Amount: 297,000 NOK, 1 year. Co-Investigator.
2017: Austrian Research Promotion Agency — EcoMove: Knowledge-based platform for predicting mobility bottlenecks and promoting sustainable behavioural change. Amount: 345,424 EUR, 2 years. Proposal Coordinator & Co-Investigator. I coordinated the proposal and developed the work package on predictive modelling and recommender systems.
2017: European Union — ReTV: Enhancing and Repurposing TV Content. Amount: 3,100,000 EUR, 4 years. Co-Investigator. I helped shape the recommender systems and predictive modelling components of the proposal.
2015: European Union — AFEL: Analytics for Everyday Learning. Amount: 2,581,940 EUR, 4 years. PI. I coordinated the project from the Know-Center side and developed work packages on visual analytics and social network analysis.
2014: Austrian Research Promotion Agency — K1 Research Center Grant. Amount: 20,000,000 EUR, 8 years. Co-PI. I contributed significantly to the strategic research and financial plan for the Social Computing research area, including the involvement of industry partners.
2014: Austrian Research Promotion Agency — Six COMET-funded industry projects. Amount: approximately 500,000 EUR, 1 year. PI. I co-acquired six industry projects in Social Computing with partners including major media and technology companies.
2014: European Union — Marie Curie ERCIM Alain Bensoussan Fellowship. Amount: 50,000 EUR, 1 year. PI. The fellowship supported research on predictive modelling in big data at NTNU in Norway.
2013: Austrian Research Promotion Agency — Three COMET-funded industry projects. Amount: approximately 250,000 EUR, 1 year. PI. I co-acquired three industry projects in Social Computing.
2012: Austrian Research Promotion Agency — Innovation Check Grant. Amount: 5,000 EUR, 1 year. PI. The project explored social recommender systems on multi-dimensional data together with an Austrian start-up.
2012: Marshall Plan Foundation — Visiting Scholar Fellowship. Amount: 7,500 USD, 5 months. PI. The fellowship supported research on efficient information access in social systems.
2011: Austrian Research Promotion Agency — Dissertation Fellowship. Amount: 100,000 EUR, 2 years. PI. The project focused on tag-based information access in social systems.

Selected distinctions

Best Paper Honorable Mention — ACM DIS, 2023
ACM Senior Member — 2020
Best of Computing — ACM Computing Reviews, 2017
Best Paper Honorable Mention — The Web Conference, 2017
Multiple best-paper and poster awards — 2011–2014

View complete awards history

2023: Best Paper Award Honorable Mention at ACM DIS 2023 for “Designing for Control in Nurse-AI Collaboration During Emergency Medical Calls.”
2020: ACM Senior Member, awarded for technical leadership and sustained professional contributions.
2020: Momentum Stipend, University of Bergen. UiB’s flagship development programme for early-career researchers pursuing an academic careers at a research university. Amount: 100,000 NOK.
2018: Austrian Chamber of Commerce Prize for the proposal “A predictive Facebook advertising model for the Austrian food retail trade.”
2017: ACM Computing Reviews — Best of Computing for “VizRec: Recommending Personalized Visualizations,” published in ACM Transactions on Interactive Intelligent Systems.
2017: Best Paper Award Honorable Mention at The Web Conference, WWW 2017, for “Investigating the Healthiness of Internet-Sourced Recipes: Implications for Meal Planning and Recommender Systems.”
2014: Best Poster Award at the ACM Conference on Hypertext and Social Media, HT 2014, for “TagRec: Towards A Standardized Tag Recommender Benchmarking Framework.”
2014: Among the Best Papers at WWW Companion 2014 for “Long Time No See: The Probability of Reusing Tags as a Function of Frequency and Recency.”
2013: Among the Best Papers at IEEE/ACM ASONAM 2013 for “Acquaintance or Partner? Predicting Partnership in Online and Location-based Social Networks.”
2013: Best Paper Award at the International Conference on Social Eco-Informatics, SOTICS 2013, for “Predicting Social Interactions from Different Sources of Location-based Knowledge.”
2013: Best Poster Award at the ACM Web Science Conference, WebSci 2013, for “Head Start: Improving Academic Literature Search with Overview Visualizations based on Readership Statistics.”
2012: Best Paper Award at the International Conference on Knowledge Management and Knowledge Technologies, I-Know 2012, for “Exploring the Differences and Similarities of Hierarchical Decentralized Search and Human Navigation in Information-networks.”
2012: Douglas Engelbart Best Paper Nomination at the ACM Conference on Hypertext and Social Media, HT 2012, for “Evaluating Tag-Based Information Access in Image Collections.”
2012: ACM Student Travel Award to attend the ACM Conference on Hypertext and Social Media, HT 2012, Milwaukee, USA.
2011: Young Scholar Best Paper Award at the International Conference on Information Technology Interfaces, ITI 2011, for “Improving the Navigability of Tagging Systems with Hierarchically Constructed Resource Lists: A Comparative Study.”
2010: Best Paper Nomination at IEEE SocialCom 2010 for “On the Navigability of Social Tagging Systems.”
2010: SFG & OFG International Travel Award from the Austrian Science Funds SFG and OFG.

Research-community leadership

Contributing to the institutions that evaluate and organise research

Selected examples complement the publication and funding record with evidence of trusted scientific service.

ACM RecSys · 2018–2020

Workshop and Late-Breaking Results Co-Chair

Helped shape programme content and emerging-work tracks at the leading conference dedicated to recommender systems.

ACM SIGIR · 2020–2021

Senior Programme Committee

Contributed senior-level assessment to a flagship international venue in information retrieval.

UMUAI · 2019

Special Issue Editor

Editorial responsibility for a specialist issue in one of the central journals for personalised and adaptive systems.

International service

52 conference committees

Programme and senior programme committee service across venues including The Web Conference, SIGIR and RecSys.

Interested in research collaboration?

I work with academic, industry and public-sector partners on responsible AI, behavioural evaluation and real-world experimentation.

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