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Prof. Nava Tintarev

Full Professor in Explainable AI at Maastricht University.

Hi, I am Prof. Nava Tintarev

I am a Full Professor in Explainable AI at Maastricht University in the Department of Advanced Computing Sciences (DACS) where I am the Director of Research. My research is funded by projects in the field of human-computer interaction in artificial advice-giving systems, such as recommender systems; specifically developing the state-of-the-art for automatically generated explanations (transparency) and explanation interfaces (recourse and control). I was a founding Co-Investigator in the ROBUST consortium to carry out long term (10-years, ~87M, NWO+EZK+private funding) research into trustworthy artificial intelligence. I am currently a co-lab director of the ICAI TAIM lab, working on trustworthy media, in collaboration with UvA and RTL. Previous funders include the European Commission, IBM, and Twitter. Senior ACM member since 2020, board member ICT-Research Platform Netherlands (IPN), incoming 2026.



(Cartoon by Erwin Suvaal from CVIII ontwerpers.)
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News
6th of June Invited talk: Frontiers in AI at the European Conference on Artificial Intelligence on the theme of Humans and AI (Abstract to follow soon)

6th of June Accepted journal paper in Re-centering the User in Recommender System Research a Special Issue of the International Journal of Human-Computer Studies (IJHCS). Title: De-centering the (Traditional) User: Multistakeholder Evaluation of Recommender Systems. Authors: Robin Burke; Gediminas Adomavicius; Toine Bogers; Tommaso Di Noia; Dominik Kowald; Julia Neidhardt; Özlem Özgöbek; Maria Soledad Pera; Nava Tintarev; Jürgen Ziegler. Pre-print.

21st of April Invited talks: Pint of Science on Diversity and Inclusion in Data Science with Dennis Soemers; Keynotes IR for Good at ECIR, and the e-enforcement academy (to consumer protection & safety authorities across EU and the Commission) on Recommender Systems: Transparency, Bias, and Privacy

7th of April Accepted full paper at UMAP'25: With Friends Like These, Who Needs Explanations? Evaluating User Understanding of Group Recommendations. Joint work with Cedric Waterschoot, Raciel Yera Toledo, and Francesco Barile. Pre-print.

7th of April I am grateful for the vote of confidence to join the board of the ICT-Research Platform Netherlands (IPN), incoming 2026.

3rd of January Our Dagstuhl seminar proposal "Challenges of Human Oversight: Achieving Human Control of AI-Based Systems" was accepted!

3rd of January Our paper, Town Mice versus Country Mice: Urban Bias in Job Recommender Systems has been accepted for presentation at the ECIR 2025 conference as a full paper. Authors: Roan Schellingerhout, Francesco Barile, and Nava Tintarev.

Teaching

I have extensive teaching experience and am a holder of a Dutch teaching qualification (BKO/UTQ).

Lecturing

  • 2022-Ongoing
    Explainable AI (KEN4246)Master Course (NL)

    Delivered and designed with Tjitze Rienstra. Topics: (1) Intrinsically interpretable models, e.g., decision trees, decision rules, linear regression. (2) Identification of violations of assumptions; such as distribution of features, feature interaction, non-linear relationships between features; and what to do about them. (3) Model agnostic explanations, e.g., LIME, scoped Rules (Anchors), SHAP (and Shapley values) (4) Ethics for explanations, e.g., fairness and bias in data, models, and outputs. (5) (Adaptive) User Interfaces for explainable AI (6) Evaluation of explanation understandability

  • 2021-Ongoing
    Recommender systemsBachelors course (NL)

    Delivered and designed with Francesco Barile. Topics: Non-personalized and Stereotype-based Recommender Systems, Classical recommender systems algorithms, e.g., Content-based Filtering, Collaborative-based Filtering, Offline Evaluation e.g., protocols, criteria, metrics, User-centered evaluation, Interfaces and interaction in Recommender systems, e.g., explanations and conversational recommender systems, Ethics, bias, and fairness in recommender systems, Advanced methods, e.g., Matrix Factorization, Hybrid recommenders.

  • 2020
    Human Computer InteractionBachelors course (NL)

    Delivered and designed with Myrthe Tielman. Topics: Requirements Elicitation, Information Architecture, Design, Expert and User Evaluation, UX for AI and Adaptive Systems

  • 2018-2020
    Crowd computing (CS4145)Master Course (NL)

    Delivered and designed with Alessandro Bozzon. Topics: Human Computation, Crowd Computing, User Modeling, Human Computer Interaction

  • 2018-2020
    Information retrieval (IN4325)Master Course (NL)

    Delivered and designed with Claudia Hauff. Topics: Natural Language Processing, Natural Language Generation

  • 2016
    Big Data and Cloud ComputingMasters Course (UK)

    Designed and delivered a Masters unit on Big Data and Cloud Computing, which is part of the Applied Data Analytics Masters program. Topics covered include: R programming, information visualization, exploratory data analysis, NoSQL, Hadoop and MapReduce.

  • 2012
    Digital SocietyBachelor course (UK)

    Course coordinator and lecturer for a multi-disciplinary course with around 200 students, addressing the impact of technology on society. This required the supervision and coordination of 5 tutors.

  • 2011-2012
    Adaptive Interactive SystemsBachelor course (UK)

    Gave invited lectures on the topic of recommender systems and adaptive hypermedia on the course Adaptive Interactive Systems

    Tutorials

  • 2010-2015

    Research methods, Digital Society, Human Computer Interaction, Web Application Development (Ruby/Rails), Data Mining and Visualization, Enterprise Computing (Java), Adaptive Interactive Systems.

Team

As research director I coordinated a department of 100 researchers, and I am a line manager of 11 assistant/associate professors, postdocs, and PhDs.

I am also a member of the Explainable AI (XAI) research theme, which is an interdisciplinary field of research focusing on providing explanations of AI-driven systems. This includes intrinsically explainable approaches to AI, as well as methods that provide explanations for decisions made by "black-box" machine learning models. The ability of AI-driven systems to explain their decisions in human-understandable terms improves the trust we place in these systems and helps address issues related to fair and unbiased decision-making. We bring together researchers working on XAI in a diverse range of application areas, including recommender systems, computational social science, causal inference for life sciences, affective computing, computer vision, knowledge representation/reasoning and machine learning. We have expertise on interactive interfaces for XAI, computational argumentation for XAI, and the evaluation of XAI systems.

Current PhD students

  • 2023 - ongoing
    Aashutosh GaneshCo-supervisor(s): Mirela Popa

    Video Summarization

  • 2023 - ongoing
    Dina ZilbershteinCo-supervisor(s): Francesco Barile

    Fair and Transparent Recommendations

  • 2022-Ongoing
    Roan SchellingerhoutCo-supervisor(s): Francesco Barile

    Explaining job recommendations

  • 2022-Ongoing
    Adarsa SivaprasadCo-supervisor(s): Ehud Reiter, Nir Oren (Aberdeen, UK)

    Explaining Risk and Uncertainty for IVF treatment


Current Postdocs

  • 2025 - ongoing
    Bulat KhaertdinovCo-supervisor(s): Mirela Popa

    Explainable Video Summarization

  • 2024 - ongoing
    Cedric Waterschoot Co-supervisor(s): Francesco Barile

    Explainable Group Recommender Systems


Alumni

  • PhDs
    Tim Draws (2024, cum laude), Shabnam Najafian (2023), Federico Cau (2023), Yucheng Jin (2019), Kirsten Smith (2016)
  • Postdocs
    Federico Cau, Amir Fard, Rishav Hada, Oana Inel, Mesut Kaya, Dimitrios Bountouridis, Emily Sullivan

Reviewing

I am an experienced academic reviewer. I serve on editorial boards, and act as senior program committee members for leading journals and conferences in both Artificial Intelligence and Human Computer Interaction. I review grant proposals in the Netherlands (NWO), Belgium (VLAIO), and the UK (EPSRC). I have served on the examination committee for PhD vivas (NL, UK, Germany, Italy, Spain, and Canada). I also serve on international hiring and promotion committees (Denmark, Switzerland)


Editorial

  • User Modeling and User-Adapted Interaction (UMUAI) (ISI@5 years: 4.131), from 2019
  • Transactions on Recommender Systems (TORS), from 2022
  • journal i-com -- Journal of Interactive Media (de Gruyter) from 2020
  • Guest editor of TORS SI on Recommender Systems for Good. Marko Tkalčič, Noemi Mauro, Alan Said, and Antonela Tommasel
  • Guest editor of UMUAI SI on Fair, Accountable and Transparent Recommender Systems. With Robin Burke, Michael D. Ekstrand, and Julita Vassileva
  • Guest Editor for a TiiS Special issue on Human Interaction With Artificial Advice Givers. With John ODonovan and Alexander Felfernig

 

Senior program committee member conferences (selection)

  • European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI)
  • User Modeling Adaptation and Personalizaiton (UMAP)
  • Recommender Systems Conference (Recsys)

Publications

I have collaborated and co-authored publications with numerous researchers around the world. I have also actively collaborated with industry partners such as RTL, Blendle, FDMediaGroep, IBM, and Twitter.

Track record: over 100 peer-reviewed papers in e.g., UMUAI, TiiS, CHI, ECAI, IUI, Recsys, WSDM. H-index: 34, most cited article 816 citations, ~5722 total (according to Google scholar on the 29/05/2025). I have recently been a co-author on papers receiving best paper awards at CHI, CHIIR, Hypertext, UMAP, and HCOMP.

You can also find my publications on Google Scholar, DBLP, and Scopus.

Committees (selection)

Organizing
  • Organization of Dagstuhl Seminar Human Oversight: Achieving Human Control of AI-Based Systems (Planned 2025)
  • Program chair ACM UMAP’2021
  • Program co-chair ACM IUI’2020
National committees
  • IPN board member incoming 2026
  • NWO-ENW domain advisory committee Computer Science, the Informaticatafel)
  • Reviewer NWO: Vidi, M

International advisory committees

  • Consultation General Purpose AI (EU Commission 2024-2025)
  • Strategic Research Program on recommenders in media markets (Free University Brussels)
  • German Gesellschaft für Informatik, Special Interest Group on User-Centred Artificial Intelligence
  • ACM Europe Technology Policy Committee (non-voting member) Steering Committee (Invited Expert)

Talks and Media

Press releases (selection)
Academic (selection)
  • Keynote on explainable AI at the summer school on Multi-omics and data sciences in complex disease
  • Speaker at CWI research seminar AI's Impact on Society, Media, and Democracy May 27-28th: Interactive Explanations for Media.
  • Keynote ``Machine Learning, Explain Yourself'' workshop on the 10-12th of April. Symposium on End User Development (IS-EUD, Cagliari, June 2023)
  • Invited speaker Maastricht University Council. Explainable Artificial Intelligence: A human-centred AI perspective (mensgericht AI)(June, 2023).
  • Panelist on Open Science and AI at UM Open Science Festival on the 25th of (May 2023)
  • Invited speaker at the SIAS research group and the Civic AI Lab University of Amsterdam (May 2023)
  • Women in Data Science Maastricht (March 2023)
  • IRlab, University of Amsterdam : Explaining Fair Group Recommendations (October 2022)
  • Keynote: TU Delft summer school on Explainable AI: Interactive and adaptive explanation interfaces for recommender systems, Aug/Sept, 2022
  • Keynote: TAILOR/EurAI summer school on Explainable AI: Interactive and adaptive explanation interfaces for recommender systems, June, 2022 (~150 participants)
  • Invited panels 2022: INLG panel on Ethics and Natural Language Generation; AAAI Explainable Agency in AI Workshop: Interactive Explanation Panel; Digital Society Conference Panel on Responsible Data Science.
  • CUSO Doctoral Program in Computer Science 2022 winter school is "data science in the digital era”, 31.01.2022-4.2.2022, Champéry, Switzerland. Seminar: Toward Measuring Viewpoint Diversity in News Consumption
  • Conference Keynote International Conference on Research Challenges in Information Science (CORE rank B, September 2020).
  • Invited speaker Duisburg-Essen. 12th of December 2019
  • Keynote at the workshop on Designing Human-Centric MIR Systems. 2nd of November 2019.
  • Invited speaker SIKS day on Explainable and responsible AI. 14th of November 2019.
  • Invited speaker TU Graz. Supporting user control for diverse item recommendations. 14th of Dec. (KnowCenter) 2018
General Audience (selection)
  • Speaker Pint of Science. Diversity and Inclusion in Machine Learning (May 2025)
  • Academic keynote Reshaping Work Conference 2025
  • UN Student Association, Maastricht (January 2025)
  • AI4Oversight, Leiden (Nov 2024)
  • Philips Innovation Award. Panel on Responsible AI (May 2023)
  • VOGIN-IP-lezing (March 2023)
  • Speaker PAS (Pleasure Arts and Science) festival Maastricht: Trust Me, I'm an AI. Reflecting on When to Correct It and When to Let it Correct You
  • Bell labs. How do we make explanations of recommendations beneficial to different users? (3rd October 2022)
  • Professors @ Huawei: Explainable AI is not yet understandable AI (28th October 2022)
  • Knowledge sharing session. Randstad (2021)
  • Invited speaker Academic Research Panel. Facebook, London. November 7th 2019.
  • Rotterdam.AI #3 Meetup - NLP & Gradient Boosting, NLG for Decision Support Systems, 5th September 2019, Rotterdam
  • Explain yourself! Arguing with Recommender Systems, Recsys.NL, 30th May 2017, Amsterdam
  • Chair of a panel on Privacy and Ethics in Big Data and AI/Cognitive Computing, Scottish Big Data Conference, Dynamic Earth, Edinburgh, 8th Dec 2016
  • What is the Internet Hiding from me?, Festival of Social Science, November 8th 2016, Bournemouth, UK
  • Microsoft Research Panel on Artificial Intelligence, 26th May 2016, Cambridge, UK.
  • Adaptive Information Presentation in the SAsSY project, InTouch Health, 11th September 2015, Goleta, California.
  • Human interaction with artificial advice givers (with John O’Donovan), 20th August 2015, Yahoo! Research, Sunnyvale, Calfornia.

Grants and awards (since 2018)



Projects

  • NWO + EKZ + private funding
    ROBUST: Trustworthy AI-based Systems for Sustainable Growth (Co-I) 2022- Ongoing

    Founding co-Investigator, and social sciences and humanities chair until 2024. Total value ~87M; Also co-lab director of lab on trustworthy AI in Media

  • European Commission
    ITN – Natural Language for Explainable AI (Co-I) 2019-2024

    €2.8M (TUD 266K)

  • TKI+IBM
    Representing diverse views for polarized topics online (Co-I)2019-2023

    €400K

  • TKI+IBM
    Devising Metrics for Assessing Echo Chambers, Incivility, and Intolerance 2018- 2023

    1.3 Million USD (TUD ~200K)

Contact

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    Email

    Last updated: 6th of June, 2025

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Resume

Employment

  • 2020 - Ongoing
    Full Professor of Explainable AI Department of Data Science and Knowledge Engineering (DKE), Faculty of Science and Engineering, Maastricht University

    Research Director (20%) November 2023 – Ongoing .
    Guest professor TU Delft (20%) October 2020-July 2023

  • 2017 - 2020
    Assistant Professor Web Information Systems Group, Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science. Delft University of Technology. Delft, the Netherlands

  • 2016 - 2017
    Assistant Professor Department of Computing & Informatics, Bournemouth University, Bournemouth, UK

  • 2010 - 2016
    Research Fellow Computing Department, University of Aberdeen, UK

    User Modeling + Natural Language Generation

  • 2009 - 2010
    R&D Engineer Telefónica Research, Barcelona, Spain

Education

  • Feb 2006 - Feb 2010
    PhD - Explaining recommendations University of Aberdeen, Aberdeen, U.K.

    Supervisors: Judith Masthoff and Ehud Reiter Generating explanations for recommender systems, and investigating (theoretically and empirically) which explanations are best for decision support (effectiveness) contra acceptance (persuasion and satisfaction).

  • Sept 2000 - March 2005
    Magister in Computer Science
    (comparable to BSc + MSc) Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden

  • Sept 2004 - Jan 2005
    MSc project under supervision of Dr. Ehud Reiter University of Aberdeen, Aberdeen, U.K.

    Content determination for reports aimed at adult literacy learners. Project aimed at adult (English) literacy learners under the framework of the SkillSum project.

  • Feb 2003 - Nov 2003
    Exchange year bachelors University of Wollongong, Wollongong, Australia,

    Undergraduate courses in Psychology