Lora Aroyo

Lora Aroyo is Full Professor in the Department of Computer Science at VU University Amsterdam, leading the Web & Media group and actively contributing to the university’s Network Institute. Her research centers on hybrid human-AI systems for video understanding, crowdsourcing, data quality, and semantic search, with strong impact on digital humanities, cultural heritage, and interactive television.

Research Interests:

• Human computation and large-scale crowdsourcing
• Hybrid human-AI architectures for multimedia analysis
• Data quality, annotation reliability, and disagreement modeling
• Semantic search and recommendation in cultural heritage
• Responsible AI and pluralistic alignment of generative models

Across 2023–2025 her publications reveal a sharp focus on AI safety for generative and multimodal systems, including red-teaming of text-to-image models, evaluation of safety perceptions across demographic groups, and the creation of open benchmarks and datasets to support these goals. Earlier work (2018–2022) addresses video discovery, cultural heritage metadata, and human-centered data practices.

Scientific Service & Funding:
She has led major Dutch and EU projects in semantic search, event-driven multimedia access, and digital infrastructures for humanities research. She currently serves on the editorial board of PeerJ Computer Science.

Labs & Teams:
Prof. Aroyo heads the Web & Media group at VU, collaborates closely with the Network Institute, and coordinates interdisciplinary teams spanning computer science, digital humanities, and AI ethics.