Ivan Srba

Research areas: artificial intelligence, machine learning, natural language processing, data analysis, disinformation and misinformation, user behavioral data, social computing, collective intelligence

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 an executive board member in three EU-funded projectsCEDMO, vera.ai and AI-CODE.

He has co-authored more than 35 publications accepted to various international fora, including: 6 current-content high-impact journal manuscripts (two of them have received more than a hundred citations so far), 8 full conference papers (accepted to premiere conferences, such as EMNLP, RecSys) and 3 book chapters. These publications have received more than 850 citations in total, resulting in h-index 16 (according to Google Scholar, as of 2024/03). He has been involved in 12 research projects. 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 currently an executive board member of CEDMO project, a task leader at HE RIA project vera.ai and a WP leader of HE IA project AI-CODE. 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

  • [January 30, 2024] I gladly accepted an invitation to provide an interview for a Slovak science-popularization podcast .jednoducho veda.
  • [October 10, 2023] Amazing news from EMNLP conference! Both submissions, which I co-authored, have been accepted as full papers for the main track of this premiere A* conference. One of these publication is a partial result of the international collaboration with the PIKE research group at the Penn State University, which I was lucky to establish and already brings the amazing results.

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

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 for international conferences:

  • Conference on User Modeling, Adaptation and Personalization (UMAP)
  • International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI)
  • Conference of the European Chapter of the ACL (EACL)

As a member of professional societies:

Misinformation Detection in Healthcare Domain

Feb 24. 2021
APVV SK-IL-RD-18-0004. 2018-2020, Partner: Bar Ilan University (prof. Sarit Kraus), Bielikova, M. – principal investigator

Innovative Methods of Education and Infrastructure for Informatics and Software Engineering

Feb 24. 2021
SCOPES program, Swiss National Science Foundation. 2015-2018, Bielikova, M. – principal investigator for FIIT STU

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