Team E. Lex: AI for Society

The Social Computing Lab studies personalized recommender systems, online social networks, information retrieval and aims to shed light on emergent social phenomena in Web-based systems. This research blends artificial intelligence, machine learning, recommender systems, and computational social science to answer three key questions: 1) How can we build online information systems that better serve users, whose interests are not in the mainstream? 2) How can we gain a deeper understanding of users and the interplay between user needs and user behavior, 3) What are the factors that impact the amplification of polarization and biases online and how can we design intelligent systems that alleviate such phenomena? Our general interest lies in building systems and new algorithms, and in producing high-quality, responsible and reproducible research results.