Jakub Šimko

Research areas: text generation and augmentation, human-computer interaction, user modeling, human computation, crowdsourcing, social media auditing, false information countering

Position: Lead and Researcher

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Jakub’s research lies at the intersection of human-computer interaction, user modeling and low-resource classification tasks. He has recently been working on algorithmic auditing of social media recommender systems (a.k.a. “social media algorithms”), and research of methods for supporting media professionals in false information countering. In the past, his research was dedicated to human computation scenarios (today relevant in human-in-the-loop setups) and to eye-tracking based user studies. 

Jakub spearheads KInIT’s international and interdisciplinary research project collaborations. Recently, he has been dedicating considerable effort to preparation of Horizon Europe grant projects. He supervised or took part in multiple research projects focused on false information countering (vera-AI, VIGILANT, AI-CODE, CEDMO, CEDMO 2, ExU) and social media auditing (AI-Auditology).

Jakub leads the Web and User Data Processing (WUDAP) team of KInIT and is a member of KInIT’s executive board and board of trustees. In this capacity, he participates in institutional development of KInIT (together with Maria Bielikova and Michal Kompan, he was the principal co-author of the lorAI project seeking to transform KInIT to a centre of excellence in low-resource AI research).

Jakub has a strong past record of educational activities and young talent nurturing. He successfully supervised many master and bachelor students and, recently, his first PhD student. He advances KInIT’s internship programme and mentoring activities.

Selected achievements

  • Co-authored the award-winning paper on social media auditing (Best Paper Award @ RecSys’21)
  • Member of the excellence team PeWe of Slovak University of Technology in Bratislava, lead prof. Mária Bieliková
  • Rector’s award for excellent results in doctoral studies at Slovak University of Technology in Bratislava, 2013

Selected activities

Other notable projects

All publications: see Google Scholar profile

Selected Student Supervising

PhD

  • Čegiň Ján – Machine learning with human in the loop. External mentor: Peter Brusilovsky. Ongoing

Master

  • Racsko Patrik – Processing gaze data using deep learning. Ongoing
  • Hanáková Martina – Measuring perceived trustworthiness on the web. Ongoing
  • Schrojf Viliam – Game with a purpose for the domain of online fake news. Ongoing
  • Krátky Marek – Game with a purpose for the domain of online fake news. Ongoing
  • Sitárová Daniela – Automatic detection of fake news based on reader behavior analysis. Defended 2020 
  • Redajová Martina – Automatic acquisition of user characteristics from gaze. Defended 2018
  • Kostova Sandra – Automatic assessment of user’s curiousness based on behavior on the web. Defended 2018
  • Mäsiar Aleš – Gaze-tracking in human computation. Defended 2017
  • Vrba Jakub Benjamín – Automated segmentation of screen recording for scene definition. Defended 2017
  • Kucharíková Zuzana – Collection of information in the wild using mobile application: monitoring of visual smog. Defended 2017
  • Kutlíková Lenka – Automatic evaluating usability of applications with eye-tracking technique. Defended 2017
  • Gašpar Peter – Linking of multimedia metadata using microblog network. Defended 2016
  • Láni Marek – Acquisition and correctness assessment of answers in an education system using crowdsourcing. Defended 2014
  • Dulačka Peter – A game with a purpose for metadata acquisition and authority discovery. Defended 2014
  • Balázs Nagy – Acquisition of metadata for effective organization of personal multimedia repositories using a game with a purpose. Defended 2016

Bachelor

  • Rybárik Sandro – Consumption and detection of misinformation by people. Defended 2020
  • Láštic Filip – Annotation application for false information. Defended 2020
  • Racsko Patrik – Analysis of fake news reader gaze. Defended 2019
  • Hanáková Martina – Analysis of fake news reader gaze. Defended 2019
  • Polakovič Martin – Game for linking resources and metadata in multimedia domain. Defended 2015
  • Mäsiar Alešn – Game for linking resources and metadata in multimedia domain. Defended 2015
  • Kišš Marek – Acquisition of semantics and metadata using games with a purpose. Defended 2012
  • Dulačka Peter – Acquisition of semantics and metadata using games with a purpose. Defended 2012