Professor · Research leader · Adviser

Building responsible AI that people can understand, question and trust.

I lead research and innovation at the intersection of recommender systems, computational user behaviour and trustworthy AI — turning rigorous evidence into technologies, organisations and real societal impact.

Portrait of Professor Christoph Trattner

Full Professor at the University of Bergen and Founder & Director of SFI MediaFutures

150+peer-reviewed publications
NOK 650m+funding secured or co-secured
~NOK 300mMediaFutures ecosystem
ACMDistinguished Speaker

What I do

Research, leadership and advice with real-world consequences

My work connects rigorous behavioural research with responsible technology design, institutional leadership and practical implementation.

Responsible AI research

Study how recommendation, personalization and generative AI shape choices, trust and information environments.

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Research & innovation leadership

Build interdisciplinary teams, partnerships and long-term programmes that move ideas from evidence to field deployment.

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Keynotes & strategic advisory

Help leaders, product teams and public organisations turn complex AI questions into clear strategy and responsible decisions.

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Selected impact

Creating the conditions for responsible innovation at scale

As founder and director of SFI MediaFutures, I conceived and built a national research–industry ecosystem for responsible media technology. The centre’s outputs are collective achievements. My contribution combines direct research and scientific leadership with the vision, consortium-building, funding, agenda-setting and organisational infrastructure that enable researchers and partners to translate work into tools, pilots and practice.

20+ yearsacross research, applied AI and innovation
25+public tools and demonstrations
Internationalacademic and industry partnerships
Media · Health · Foodhigh-impact application domains

Partner outcomes

Evidence from real media settings

Selected research-to-practice and partner-outcome cases documented through MediaFutures, from provenance and verification to recommendation systems tested with partner data and users.

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Profile

Responsible AI grounded in human behaviour

Christoph Trattner is one of Europe’s leading experts and a research and innovation leader in responsible recommender systems, computational user behaviour, and trustworthy AI. With more than 20 years of experience at the intersection of academia, industry, and applied AI innovation, he helps organisations design, evaluate, and govern AI systems that influence human decision-making in high-impact domains such as media, health, food, and consumer behaviour.

He is a Full Professor at the University of Bergen, Director of the Research Centre for Responsible Media Technology & Innovation (SFI MediaFutures), and founder and leader of the DARS research group, Norway’s largest research group on recommender systems. He also leads the Norwegian Computational Behaviour & AI Lab, where interdisciplinary teams develop responsible AI solutions for real-world societal and business challenges. In addition, he is a founding member and board member of NoSoCSS, an interdisciplinary initiative advancing computational social science in Norway and beyond.

Trattner has initiated and led large-scale research and innovation collaborations involving startups, public-sector organisations, multinational companies, and policy stakeholders across Europe and the United States. He has also been invited by governments and public authorities to provide policy input, including by the Norwegian government to discuss research–industry collaboration. As founder and director of SFI MediaFutures, he conceived and built a national research–industry ecosystem that translates responsible AI research into practical technologies for journalism, media production, recommendation, fact-checking, accessibility, and democratic resilience.

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Recent activity

Latest news

A more curated news feed with direct links to papers, programmes, projects and the publication record.

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06/2026

Three papers presented at ACM UMAP 2026 in Gothenburg

At ACM UMAP 2026 in Gothenburg, our team presented three papers spanning trustworthy news personalisation, selective news avoidance and AI-generated recipes. Tobias Wessel presented work on fact-checked LLMs for editor trust, Svenja Lys Forstner presented INRA work on explanations for low-interest news, and Yelyzaveta Lysova presented work on how users overlook nutritional flaws in LLM-generated recipes.

05/2026

INRA workshop paper published at ACM UMAP 2026

Our SFI MediaFutures paper on why explanations for low-interest news fail to persuade selective news avoiders is now available in the ACM UMAP 2026 workshop proceedings.

04/2026

Decision-support prototype study published in JMIR

A quasi-experimental feasibility study shows how recommender-based support and structured documentation can contribute to operator performance in medical communication centres.

04/2026

CuratedAI and VaccAI awarded

Two Research Council of Norway mobility projects connected to SFI MediaFutures and UiB were awarded, strengthening work on AI transparency, media literacy, vaccine beliefs and trustworthy health communication.

03/2026

Two full papers accepted at ACM UMAP 2026

New work examines editor trust in fact-checked LLM-supported news personalisation and how users overlook nutritional flaws in LLM-generated recipes.

01/2026

NoSoCSS launched

NoSoCSS is a new interdisciplinary initiative advancing computational social science research at the intersection of data, AI, platforms and society.

Open earlier news archive
  • [11/2025] The C2PA provenance-label study on trust in digital news platforms was accepted at AAAI ICWSM 2026. PDF
  • [11/2025] My PhD student Ayoub passed his PhD defence with flying colours. He also had a paper accepted at IEEE Access in the context of his PhD about digital nudges and recommender systems. PDF
  • [09/2025] I started a new research initiative focused on user behaviour and responsible AI. Check it out
  • [08/2025] Six workshop papers at ACM RecSys 2025 were accepted for publication and presentation by our PhD and MA students.
  • [07/2025] Happy summer holidays.
  • [05/2025] “The role of GPT as an adaptive technology in climate change journalism” was accepted at ACM UMAP 2025 as a full paper. PDF
  • [05/2025] MediaFutures passed its midway evaluation with flying colours.
  • [04/2025] “Decoding Global Palates: Unveiling Cross-Cultural Flavor Preferences Through Online Recipes” was published in Foods. PDF
  • [01/2025] “Supporting healthier food choices through AI-tailored advice: A research agenda” was published in PEC Innovation. PDF
  • [01/2025] “Evaluating Sequential Recommendations in the Wild: A Case Study on Offline Accuracy, Click Rates, and Consumption” was accepted at ECIR 2025. PDF
  • [10/2024] Three papers led by our PhD students were accepted at the INRA and HealthRecsys workshops at ACM RecSys 2024 in Bari.
  • [09/2024] “Advancing Visual Food Attractiveness Predictions for Healthy Food Recommender Systems” was accepted at the HealthRecsys workshop at ACM RecSys 2024.
  • [08/2024] “Examining the merits of feature-specific similarity functions in the news domain using human judgments” was published in User Modeling and User-Adapted Interaction. PDF
  • [06/2024] MediaFutures PhD candidate Anastasiia Klimashevskaia had a Level 2 journal article accepted based on her PhD work.
  • [06/2024] In total, we had four papers accepted at ACM UMAP 2024. Read the news here.
  • [04/2024] Our Health Recommender Systems workshop proposal with Helma Torkamaan, Hanna Hauptmann and myself as organisers was accepted at ACM RecSys 2024 as a full-day workshop.
  • [03/2024] “Shaping the Future of Content-based News Recommenders: Insights from Evaluating Feature-Specific Similarity Metrics” was accepted at ACM UMAP 2024 as a full paper.
  • [02/2024] Our MediaFutures opinion paper “Leveraging Professional Ethics for Responsible AI: Applying AI techniques to journalism” was published in Communications of the ACM. PDF
  • [2023–2012] Older news remains in the historical source archive.

Scholarship

Featured recent publications

Three recent studies spanning responsible media AI, user trust and health-related generative AI.

Publication record