Nava Tintarev

Nava Tintarev is a Full Professor in Explainable AI at Maastricht University, Department of Advanced Computing Sciences (DACS), Faculty of Science and Engineering. She also holds a visiting professorship at TU Delft. As Director of Research in DACS since 2023, she leads a department of 100 researchers and mentors junior faculty and PhDs.

Her educational background includes a Magister in Computer Science from Uppsala University and a PhD from the University of Aberdeen, with early studies in Psychology in Australia.

Nava's research focuses on human-centered AI, particularly explainable artificial intelligence (XAI), transparency, fairness, and user control in AI systems. Her work bridges Human-Computer Interaction and AI, emphasizing interactive explanations in recommender systems, search, and decision support. She investigates how users understand and trust AI advice, with applications in media, HR, and public discourse.

Her recent publications show a strong trend toward mitigating cognitive biases (e.g., confirmation bias, urban bias), evaluating explanation effectiveness, and designing multimodal, user-adaptive interfaces. She explores logic-style explanations, stance detection, and long-term human-AI collaboration.

• Best Paper Award at CHI
• Best Paper Award at CHIIR
• Best Paper Award at Hypertext
• Best Paper Award at UMAP
• Best Paper Award at HCOMP
• Senior Member of ACM (since 2020)

Nava has supervised numerous PhD students and leads major grants including the ROBUST program (~87M), EU ITN on Natural Language for XAI, and industry collaborations with IBM and Twitter. She is co-director of the ICAI TAIM lab on trustworthy media. She serves on editorial boards (UMUAI, TORS), program committees (ECAI, UMAP, RecSys), and advisory bodies including NWO and the incoming IPN board (2026). Her lab brings together interdisciplinary researchers in XAI, computational social science, causal inference, and affective computing.