Marian-Andrei Rizoiu

Marian-Andrei Rizoiu is an Associate Professor leading the Behavioral Data Science lab at the University of Technology Sydney's Data Science Institute, Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology. He holds concurrent appointments as an Honorary Lecturer at Australian National University and Honorary Research Scientist at Data61. Previously, he has held visiting professor positions at Imperial College London, Jean Monnet University, and Max Planck Institute for Software Systems.

• Associate Professor in Behavioral Data Science, UTS Data Science Institute (Jan 2024 - present)
• Senior Lecturer in Behavioral Data Science, UTS Data Science Institute (Jul 2021 - Jan 2024)
• Lecturer in Computer Science, UTS Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology (Feb 2019 - Jul 2021)

Dr. Rizoiu's research focuses on interdisciplinary work crossing computer and social sciences, blending psycholinguistics, digital communication, and stochastic modeling to understand human attention dynamics online, the emergence of influence, and opinion polarization. His key contributions include developing theoretical models for online information diffusion that can account for complex social phenomena, and building skill-based real-time occupation transition recommender systems that link social media-predicted personality profiles with occupation skill requirements.

His research outputs reveal strong trends in misinformation detection, social influence measurement, and online radicalization pathways. Recent publications demonstrate sophisticated modeling approaches including state space models for early misinformation prediction, multivariate Hawkes processes for analyzing partially interval-censored data, and ideology detection pipelines. His work spans computational social science, machine learning, and practical applications for countering harmful online content.

• Excellence Award and Academic of the Year at the 2023 Australian Defence Industry Awards
• ADMA'22 Best Application Paper

Dr. Rizoiu has successfully secured over $2.9 million in research funding from selective funders including Meta Research, Defence Science and Technology Group, Department of Home Affairs, and Defence Innovation Network. He has supervised 3 PhD students to completion and more than 10 Honours students, most achieving High Distinction. His research has been applied in real-world contexts including serving as an expert for NSW government's Defamation Law Reform and providing evidence for Australian Federal Senate inquiry into media diversity.

He leads the Behavioral Data Science lab which focuses on modeling human behavior in online environments, with particular emphasis on mis- and disinformation detection and labor market analysis. The lab has developed tools like TRACK, UTS OPEN's software for recommending personalized learning pathways, used by over 750 students and professionals.