Petra Kralj Novak

Dr. Petra Kralj Novak is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Network and Data Science, Central European University (Vienna, Austria) and a part-time researcher at the Department of Knowledge Technologies, Jožef Stefan Institute (Ljubljana, Slovenia). She holds a PhD from Jožef Stefan International Postgraduate School, where her thesis on Supervised Descriptive Rule Induction was published in the Journal of Machine Learning Research.

Her research focuses on social media mining, combining machine learning with network analysis to study sentiment, hate speech, and emoji semantics. She pioneered emoji sentiment analysis in her influential 2015 paper. Additional interests include knowledge discovery, subgroup mining, and applications in bioinformatics (e.g., GMO detection tools).

Her publications predominantly explore machine learning applications in social networks (retweet dynamics, misinformation spread) and biomedical domains (gene expression, GMO testing). Recent work emphasizes social media analytics and network science, while earlier contributions centered on algorithmic methods for subgroup discovery and biomedical data mining.

Leadership & Projects:

• Coordinator of EU REC AG project IMSyPP (2020-2022) on hate speech monitoring
• Member of DGCNECT expert group for 'Digital media and human well-being'
• Program co-chair for ECML PKDD 2022 and Discovery Science 2018

Teaching: Leads courses in Fundamentals of Data Analysis and Introduction to Machine Learning at Central European University.