Elisabeth Lex

Assoc. Prof. Dr. Elisabeth Lex is a tenured Associate Professor at Graz University of Technology (TUG) and PI of the Recommender Systems and Social Computing Lab. She serves as Dean of Study for the master's program in Computational Social Systems. With a habilitation in Applied Computer Science, her research focuses on psychology-informed recommender systems, user modeling, and computational social science. She has published over 100 articles in venues like WebConf, HT, and RecSys, and led major projects like the trans-university 'Polarization in Public Opinion.'

Education:

• PhD in Computer Science (2011), TU Graz
• Postdoc at Universidad Nacional de San Luis (Argentina) and RWTH Aachen (Germany)

Research Interests: Her work integrates cognitive science principles into AI systems, addressing fairness, privacy, and transparency in recommendations. She explores how human behavior and social dynamics influence algorithmic systems, with applications in music recommendation, misinformation detection, and polarization analysis.

Article Trends: Recent work emphasizes trustworthy AI, including privacy-aware recommendation systems (e.g., differential privacy), bias mitigation in music recommendations, and computational framing analysis for political narratives. She bridges technical innovation with societal impacts, such as analyzing polarization in public health policies via social media.

Scientific Awards & Grants:

• Outstanding Paper Award (ISSI 2015)
• EU H2020 grants (TRIPLE, AI4EU, OpenUP)
• Transuniversity Research Project on Polarization (€325k funding)

Advising & Labs: Supervised over 20 PhD/Master students on topics like conspiracy narratives, privacy in recommendations, and job recommendation systems. Her lab develops open-source frameworks (e.g., TagRec, AFEL-REC) and collaborates with industry partners through the Know-Center.

Labs/Teams: Leads the Recommender Systems and Social Computing Lab at TUG, part of the interdisciplinary Social Computing area at the Know-Center. Collaborates with global initiatives like OpenAire and Open Knowledge Maps.