Markus Zanker is a full professor at the Faculty of Computer Science , Free University of Bozen-Bolzano (Italy), where he previously served as vice dean for studies and director for study programmes. He held associate professorship at Alpen-Adria-Universitaet Klagenfurt, Austria (2011-2016). Research Focus : Knowledge-based decision support systems, personalized information filtering/retrieval, product recommendation, conversational sales advisor systems, and product configurators Current Projects : Causal discovery in recommender systems, medical recommendation systems (insulin dosing, drug combinations), explainable AI for tourism and news recommendation The 15 most recent publications (2016-2025) cover topics including: Deep reinforcement learning for medical applications Causal modeling in tourism and online decision-making Explainable recommendation frameworks Session-based news and video recommendations Evaluation of open-source recommendation libraries His work also explores user interaction patterns through studies on bimodal rating statistics, collaborative explanations, and proactive recommendation engagement.






