24.06.21, MediaFutures – As the development of resposible media technology continues, so does the development of our team. Since january the research center has welcomed eight new employes and we are proud to announce and present them. Please welcome our new employees, Irene Costera Meijer, Dietmar Jannach, Enrico Motta, Oskar Juhlin, Erik Knudsen, Samia Touileb, Kata Urban and Marius Hatland.
Irene Costera Meijer, Prof. II
Position: Prof. II in WP1 Understanding Media Experiences
Main affiliation: Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
Start date: 1 March 2021
Duration: 3 years
Bio: Irene Costera Meijer is Professor of Journalism Studies and head of the Journalism Studies section at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. She is a world leading journalism and media scholar having recently set the agenda for the audience turn in journalism studies. Her research appeared in many journals and books and focuses on what news users value about journalism. She also works as a professor II at the Research group for Media Use and Audience Studies of the Department of Information Science and Media Studies at University of Bergen.
Her research interests focus on audience studies and in particular on the impact of digitalization on changing practices of media consumption, media experiences and news use. When doing research she often collaborates with media organisations. This makes it easier to translate scholarly results into relevant suggestions for every day professional practices and vice versa, understanding the fundamental dilemmas of professional practices and translating these into academic publications. Costera Meijer is also on the editorial board of the academic journals Digital Journalism and Journalism Practice.
Position: Prof. II in WP1 Understanding Media Experiences
Main affiliation: Universität Klagenfurt
Start date: 1 March 2021
Duration: 3 years
Bio: Dietmar Jannach joined the Department of Artificial Intelligence and Cybersecurity at AAU Klagenfurt as a full professor in 2017. Before that, from 2008 to 2017, he was a full professor of Computer Science at TU Dortmund, Germany. His main research theme is related to the application of intelligent system technology to practical problems and the development of methods for building knowledge-intensive software applications. Generally, his research interest is broad and he has been working on a number of topics over the years, including recommender systems technology, knowledge-based systems development, constraint-based systems, semantic web applications and web mining, special topics in operations research and applications of AI planning as well as on specific software engineering problems in the area of the development and debugging of declarative programs. Among others, his research has been published in IEEE TKDE, Artificial Intelligence, JAIR, UMUAI, ACM TIST, ACM TiiS, ACM TMIS, Journal of Web Semantics, J of Human Computer Studies, Journal of Systems and Software, Automated Software Engineering, IEEE Intelligent Systems, Annals of Operations Research, and in the proceedings of IJCAI, AAAI, RecSys, ICDM, CIKM, WSDM, or ISWC.
Position: Prof. II in WP3 Media Content Production & Analysis
Main affiliation: The Open University
Start date: 1 July 2021
Duration: 3 years
Bio: Professor Enrico Motta is a Professor of Knowledge Technologies at the Knowledge Media Institute (KMi) of the UK’s Open University and at the Department of Information Science and Media Studies of the University of Bergen. His work spans a variety of research areas to do with data science, semantic and language technologies, intelligent systems and robotics, and human-computer interaction. He has authored over 350 refereed publications and his h-index is 69. Over the years, Prof. Motta has received over £12M in external funding from a variety of institutional funding bodies, including EU, EPSRC, AHRC, the Arts Council, NERC, HEFCE, and Innovate UK. His research has also attracted funding from commercial organizations, including the top two international scientific publishers, Elsevier and Springer Nature. Since 2014 he has been collaborating with Milton Keynes Council on its ‘smart city’ agenda, first as Director of the £17M, award-winning MK:Smart project, and then on the CityLabs and MK:5G initiatives.
Prof. Motta has also acted as advisor on strategic research programmes to several national and international organizations in a variety of countries, including UK, US, The Netherlands, Austria, Finland, and Estonia. He was Editor in Chief of the International Journal of Human Computer Studies from 2004 to 2018, one of the top international journals in HCI. In 2003 he founded the ground-breaking European Summer School on Ontological Engineering and the Semantic Web (SSSW), which provided the main international postgraduate forum for learning about semantic technologies until its final edition in 2016. The innovative pedagogic model pioneered in the SSSW series of summer schools has since been adopted by several other similar initiatives.
His current activities include the use of AI techniques in the academic publishing industry; the deployment of intelligent robots in healthcare and urban settings; the development of sophisticated data management infrastructures for smart cities; and the use of AI techniques in computational journalism.
Position: Prof. II in WP4 Media Content Interaction & Accessibility
Main affiliation: Stockholm University
Start date: 1 March 2021
Duration: 3 years
Bio: Oskar Juhlin is Professor at Stockholm University at the Departement of Computing and Systems Sciences. He is also Professor II at the Department of Information Science and Media Studies at Bergen University. He is founder and former Director of Mobile Life VinnExcellence Center. He has an interdisciplinary background spanning technology and social science. Oskar has conducted research and managed groups in many design fields such as fashion tech, social media and road traffic, animal computer interaction, and video interaction. His approach draws on combining ethnographic fieldwork of user practices with design and technical research, to generate knowledge and new applications, referred to as “associative design”.
His research is mainly published at Conferences such as ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Mobile HCI on Human-Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services, and CSCW on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing.
Recently he has also been granted two patents and founded two companies (Figuracy/Shapecompanion AB and Liveling AB) in the areas of social media and fashion, as well as live video production.
Position: Researcher in WP1 Understanding Media Experiences
Start date: 1 January 2021
Duration: 3 years
Bio: Erik Knudsen is a researcher at the MediaFutures Research Centre for Responsible Media Technology and Innovation. He did his postdoc at the Digital Social Science Core Facility (DIGSSCORE) and hold a PhD from the Department of Information Science and Media Studies at the University of Bergen, Norway. Much of his research innvolves methodological innovation and explores patterns and effects of news and political communication, trust in journalism, and exposure to like-minded information, and polarization and fragmentation. He is founder and PI of the Norwegian Journalism Panel and the interdisciplinary Political Communication Research Group at DIGSSCORE. His work has appeared in Political Communication, Journalism, Digital Journalism, Scandinavian Political Studies, and other peer-reviewed journals.
Position: Researcher in WP5 Norwegian Language Technologies
Start date: 1 June 2021
Duration: 4 years
Bio: Samia Touileb comes from a position as PostDoc at the Language Technology Group (LTG), Department of Informatics, at the University of Oslo. She has a PhD in Information Science with a focus on Natural Language Processing (NLP) from the University of Bergen, and has been working within research in and applications of NLP for almost a decade.
Her main research interests are information extraction, sentiment analysis, and applications of Natural Language Processing and machine learning methods to tasks within social science research. She also mainly works on language technological under-resourced languages such as Norwegian.
Kata Urban, Research Assistant
Position: Research Assistant in WP6 Administration, Exploitation, Communication & Innovation Management
Start date: 1 June 2021
Duration: 1 year
Bio: Kata Urban is a Research Assistant at MediaFutures. She holds a Master’s degree in Globalisation and Sustainable Development from NTNU where she focused on circular economy, women’s empowerment and social value creation. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Liberal Arts, specialised in Communication and Media studies from ELTE (Eotvos Lorand University) and a Bachelor’s degree in Political Science from ELTE. During her Bachelor studies she focused on voting behaviour and social media use in politics. She has experience in project management, editorial work, communication and sustainability from international environments.
Marius Hatland, Research Assistant
Position: Research Assistant in WP6 Administration, Exploitation, Communication & Innovation Management
Start date: 15 June 2021
Duration: 2 months
Bio: Marius Hatland is a Reseach Assistant at MediaFutures. He is currently undertaking a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science at the University of Bergen. After finishing his Bachelor’s degree he plans to take a Master’s degree in Informatics with Machine Learning as the main field of study. His main tasks at the research centre involves maintaining and improving the MediaFutures website. He has a passion for programming and a hunger to expand his knowledge within the field of information technology.