Markus Zanker

Markus Zanker is a full professor at the Faculty of Computer Science, Free University of Bozen-Bolzano (Italy), where he previously served as vice dean for studies and director for study programmes. He held associate professorship at Alpen-Adria-Universitaet Klagenfurt, Austria (2011-2016).

• Research Focus: Knowledge-based decision support systems, personalized information filtering/retrieval, product recommendation, conversational sales advisor systems, and product configurators
• Current Projects: Causal discovery in recommender systems, medical recommendation systems (insulin dosing, drug combinations), explainable AI for tourism and news recommendation

The 15 most recent publications (2016-2025) cover topics including:

• Deep reinforcement learning for medical applications
• Causal modeling in tourism and online decision-making
• Explainable recommendation frameworks
• Session-based news and video recommendations
• Evaluation of open-source recommendation libraries

His work also explores user interaction patterns through studies on bimodal rating statistics, collaborative explanations, and proactive recommendation engagement.