Academic Bio

I am currently appointed as Lead Professor (1404) by the University Board of the University of Bergen (UiB) at UiB, where I 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 300 million NOK. 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 365 million NOK 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 conferences and workshops. Notable examples include serving as co-chair (Workshop/Late-Breaking Results/Tutorials) for ACM RecSys (2018-2020 & 2024) and program co-chair for MMM2023 and general co-chair for the HealthRecys workshop series held at ACM RecSys. In additon, I currently serve on the board of preforma, a pioneering Norwegian health-tech start-up focused on women's health and I am also a former board member of Media City Bergen, Norway's largest media cluster. Furthermore, I provide advisory services to tech start-ups, 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.

Business Bio

I am a Lead Professor at the University of Bergen, where I founded and currently direct the Research Centre for Responsible Media Technology & Innovation (SFI MediaFutures). I also lead DARS, Norway's largest research group specializing in Recommender Systems. My academic foundation includes a PhD, MSc, and BSc in Computer Science from Graz University of Technology, complemented by a range of international academic and visiting appointments.

With over 20 years of industry experience, my research focuses on Responsible AI within the fields of Data Science and Recommender Systems. I have successfully led and managed numerous large-scale, research-driven industry projects with a combined value of over 650 million NOK. These projects have supported organizations of all sizes—from start-ups to multinational corporations—in developing cutting-edge AI products and services that drive innovation and growth.

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!
• [2023 - 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
• 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
• 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
• 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

Copyright © 2024 Christoph Trattner (Last updated: October 10th, 2024)