Vera Schmitt

Dr. Vera Schmitt is an Assistant Professor and leads the XplaiNLP research group at the Quality and Usability Lab (Q&U) of Technische Universität Berlin. She established the XplaiNLP group in 2023 through third-party funding and focuses on NLP, AI explainability, HCI, and legal aspects of AI systems, particularly in disinformation detection and medical data processing. She holds a BA in Political and Administrative Sciences from the University of Konstanz, a Master's in Data Science from Leuphana University Lüneburg, and a PhD from TU Berlin on data protection economics.

Her research spans NLP (misinformation detection, text anonymization), data synthesis (medical records), XAI (natural language explanations), HCI (collaborative AI systems), and usable privacy (economic perspectives of privacy). She has secured over €4.1 million in third-party funding, including the €1.4 million BMBF grant for her AI junior research group. Current projects include VERANDA (medical data anonymization), NEWS-POLYGRAPH (disinformation), and FakeXplain (AI fact-checking).

Her work emphasizes ethical AI alignment with regulations like the AI Act and GDPR. Teaching includes seminars on usable privacy, AI ethics, and advanced statistics. She collaborates with institutions like DFKI’s SLT group and has published extensively on topics ranging from privacy nudges to multimodal fake news detection.