Research Group
Ivan Srba
Research areas: artificial intelligence, machine learning, natural language processing, disinformation and misinformation, user behavioral data, social computing
Position: Researcher
Ivan has expertise in artificial intelligence, machine learning and natural language processing, with a focus on low resource AI, learning with limited labelled data, multilinguality and social computing systems, especially social networks. His current primary research interest is in supporting media professionals in producing credible content and countering online disinformation. He is currently a researcher and a principal investigator of the AI-Auditology – a “big research project” supported by the Slovak Research Agency. Besides that he is an executive board member in three EU-funded projects – CEDMO, vera.ai and AI-CODE.
He has co-authored more than 40 publications accepted to various international fora, including: 7 current-content high-impact journal manuscripts (two of them have received more than a hundred citations so far), 11 full conference papers (accepted to premiere conferences, such as EMNLP, ACL, RecSys) and 3 book chapters. These publications have received more than 1000 citations in total, resulting in h-index 16 (according to Google Scholar, as of 2024/09). He has been involved in 13 research projects, HE RIA vera.ai, HE IA AI-CODE, HE IA VIGILANT, or CEDMO to name few. His international research record includes projects with the Harvard University (USA), The University of Sheffield (UK), The Centre for Research & Technology, Hellas – CERTH (Greece), or the University of Lugano (Switzerland). He is a member of ACM educational and scientific computing society, ACL community and a former member of the Datalys@PeWe research group. He regularly serves as a reviewer for international conferences and journals published by ACM, IEEE, Springer and Elsevier. So far, he has supervised 23 bachelor and 19 master successfully-defended theses.
He has participated as a data scientist and project lead in many research and industry projects. He was responsible for development of the first university-wide educational CQA system named Askalot, which has been deployed at three universities in three European countries and at MOOC system edX and which was used by 8000 students from 147 countries around the world. His other projects include a recommender system for a large internet shop (ZlavaDna.sk), a smart parking system (zaparkuj.to) and a multibank application developed in co-operation with a renowned European IT company (Unicorn) and a Slovak commercial bank (VUB).
News
- [August 24, 2024] I would like to invite all enthusiasts in AI or disinformation tackling to participate in the SemEval 2025 Shared Task 7: Multilingual and Crosslingual Fact-Checked Claim Retrieval, which I have an opportunity to co-organize.
- [August 1, 2024] We are building X-Ray machine for social media! AI-Auditology, a new research project in which I am a principal investigator, got funded from the Slovak Research and Innovation Authority (VAIA) and starts today (August 1, 2024). The project aims to reveal how social media algorithms contribute to spreading disinformation and other harmful content.
- [July 18, 2024] Great news from ACL 2024 conference! All three submissions, which I had a chance to participate in, have been accepted as full papers for the main track of this premiere A* conference.
Selected achievements
- Finalist of the ESET Science Award 2023 in the category of outstanding scientist in Slovakia under the age of 35.
- The winning solution at SemEval 2023 Task 3 subtask 3 data challenge on detection of persuasion techniques. The research team, which I supervised with a big honor, has won the first place for 6 out of 9 languages. For the remaining languages, we placed in 2nd, 3rd and 4th places, and thus becoming univocally the most successful team!
- Best Paper award at the RecSys 2021 conference (the awarded full paper)
- Member of the excellence team PeWe of Slovak University of Technology in Bratislava, lead prof. Mária Bieliková
2020, Slovak University of Technology - Award for Supervision of the Best Master Thesis
Nov 2019, Tatra banka Foundation - Slovak Student Person of the Academic Year 2015/16 in Category Informatics, Mathematics and Physics
Dec 2016, Junior Chamber International – Slovakia - Rector’s Award for Excellent Study Results during Doctoral Study
Sep 2016, Slovak University of Technology - Rector’s Award for the Best Student of Doctoral Study for the Academic Years 2012/13, 2013/2014, 2014/2015
Slovak University of Technology - Best Master Thesis Dean’s Award
Nov 2012, Faculty of Informatics and Information Technologies, Slovak University of Technology - Rector’s Award for the Best Student of Master Study for the Academic Years 2010/11, 2011/12
Slovak University of Technology
Selected activities
- Research visit at The University of Sheffield (with the duration of 6 weeks, starting in June 2023), which was supported and funded by the SoBigData++ Transnational Access (TNA). I summarized my positive experience from the visit as a blog post.
- Invited talk on “Algorithmic auditing of political biases in recommender systems” at the online e-Symposium on Computational Politics 2023, Part of the AI Mellontology Symposium series (March 1, 2023)
- Participation at the panel discussion on Technology and AI at the CEDMO International Conference #CIC2022 (September 22-23, 2022, Prague)
- Invited presentation at Hackathon on Code against Hate, 2020
- Invited presentation at RuleML webinar, 2020
- Attendance at Dagstuhl seminar “Cybersafety Threats – from Deception to Aggression”, 2019
- Attendance at Heidelberg Laureate Forum, 2017
Professional Service
As a reviewer for journals:
- ACM Transactions on Information Systems (ACM)
- ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (ACM)
- ACM Transactions on Management Information Systems (ACM)
- Computer Science Review (Elsevier)
- Technology, Knowledge and Learning (Springer)
- Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery (Springer)
- IEEE Transactions on Learning Technologies (IEEE)
- Computers & Education (Elsevier)
- a program committee member for conferences
As a program committee member or reviewer for international venues:
- ACL Rolling Review (ARR, papers targeting EMNLP, ACL)
- Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS)
- European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI)
- International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI)
- Conference of the European Chapter of the ACL (EACL)
- Conference on User Modeling, Adaptation and Personalization (UMAP)
As a member of professional societies:
- ACL Membership
Selected Projects
Selected Publications
A Survey on Stability of Learning with Limited Labelled Data and its Sensitivity to the Effects of Randomness
Pecher, B., Srba, I., Bielikova, M. Learning with limited labelled data, such as prompting, in-context learning, fine-tuning, meta-learning or few-shot learning, aims to effectively train a model using only a…
Selected Student Supervising
PhD
- Robert Belanec – Machine learning with limited (labelled) data. Started 2023. Co-supervised with Maria Bielikova.
- Branislav Pecher – Addressing small labeled data in machine learning training. Started 2021. Co-supervised with Maria Bielikova.
Master
- Matej Čief – Use of Semi-supervised Learning for Antisocial Behavior Detection. Defended 2021
- Peter Mačinec – Fake News Detection Using Semi-supervised Learning. Defended 2021
- Veronika Žatková – Health related fake news detection using data analysis and machine learning. Defended 2020
- Štefancová Elena – Recommendation Taking the Time Aspects of Users and Items into Account. Defended 2019
- Mačina Jakub – Recommendation of New Questions in Online Student Communities. Defended 2017
- Grznár Marek – Adaptive Collaboration Support in Community Question Answering. Defended 2015
Bachelor
- Mačinec Peter – Fake news detection using machine learning. Defended 2019
- Babinec Peter – Automatic Tag Recommendation in CQA Systems. Defended 2017
- Huňa Adrián – User Reputation in Community Question Answering. Defended 2015