Finalist for the Research Council of Norway’s Innovation Award 2026
Congratulations to Radionor Communications on winning the Research Council of Norway’s Innovation Award 2026. Although I did not take home the prize, I am proud to have been one of five finalists. This recognition reflects the collaboration we have built at SFI MediaFutures to develop responsible AI for media. My heartfelt thanks go to our researchers, students, research and industry partners, support staff, and colleagues at the University of Bergen.
Our RecSys study explores whether AI-assisted headline reframing can reduce perceived polarization and negative emotion. This article explains the findings, their limits and why editorial checking remains essential.
Newsrooms need to test AI tools on their own journalistic tasks, document failures and repeat evaluations when systems change. The ability to investigate performance should come with the purchase.
As AI takes on a greater role in research, scientists need to be able to inspect, challenge and correct its contributions. An editorial on preserving scrutiny and accountability in AI-assisted science.
Research achievement, leadership competence and institutional power are different things. Universities need open competition and meaningful leadership assessment to give new voices a fair chance.
When AI writes the first draft, newsrooms still need a plan for developing the judgement required to check it. Editors should ask what each automated task used to teach new colleagues—and how they will gain that experience now.
Doing better with AI is not the same as retaining the skills needed to check its answers. An argument for keeping the human part of the thinking visible.
Journalists need more than an “AI expert” label. I argue for naming the work behind an expert’s claims and making the limits of that expertise explicit.
Today’s students will teach tomorrow’s professionals. Schools need to assess both what learners produce with AI and what they can understand and do on their own.
An opinion piece on AI-generated health advice and the importance of discussing chatbot use in clinical consultations, drawing on research into the reliability of AI-generated nutrition information.
A changed news feed can change clicks without changing interests. Responsible recommendation should help readers discover more while respecting their decision to say no.
Content credentials document where an image came from. That is not the same as proving a news source deserves our trust. The distinction matters for readers and newsrooms.
A revised framework and evaluation protocol for studying what people can do after AI-assisted verification, including later judgments of new claims. Public working paper; not peer reviewed.
The Arendalsuka 2026 programme included a MediaFutures session on responsible AI in Norwegian news media, with VITAL, verification and misinformation among the topics.
Promising research can lose momentum between a project, a prototype and everyday use. Shared ownership and sustained collaboration need to survive those transitions.
Labelling synthetic material is only part of the task. Journalism also needs ways to make authentic content traceable when it travels beyond a publisher’s own platform.
AI-assisted work can look excellent without revealing what its author understands. Assessment needs to distinguish polished output from independent capability.
Our Research & Practice Note “Exploring Revealed Behavior and Stated Profiles in Longitudinal News Recommendation,” with Thomas Elmar Kolb and Alain Dominique Starke, reports a four-wave study with 262 participants. Preliminary results show that article-selection behavior shifts with feed composition while stated topic profiles remain comparatively stable—an important caution against treating short-term clicks or likes as stable preference change.
Universities prepare academics to teach. Leadership also needs preparation before people take responsibility for staff, budgets and institutional direction.
Our paper “Reducing Perceived Polarization through Affect-Balanced News Reframing,” with Jia-Hua Jeng, Alain D. Starke, David Elsweiler and Christoph Trattner, has been accepted for the ACM Conference on Recommender Systems 2026.
Students, researchers and lasting institutional knowledge are part of the infrastructure that turns research into value. Innovation policy should not separate them from the research it funds.
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.
A quasi-experimental feasibility study shows how recommender-based support and structured documentation can contribute to operator performance in medical communication centres.
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.
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.
[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
[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.