Maria Bielikova

Maria developed the long-term vision and strategy for the institute. She also conducts research focusing on human-computer interaction analysis, user modelling and personalization. Recently, she has been working in data analysis and modelling of antisocial behavior on the Web. She is active in discussions on trustworthy AI at the national and European levels. For example, she is a former member of the High Level Expert Group on Artificial Intelligence established by the European Commission. Currently she is a chair of the Permanent Committee for Ethics and Regulation of AI established by the Ministry of Investments, Regional Development and Informatization of the Slovak Republic. She was also a member of the European Commission Joint Research Center Board of Governors.

Before her work at KInIT, Maria was employed at the Slovak University of Technology for more than 30 years — 15 as a full professor, lead of the PeWe research group (Personalized Web) and director of the User eXperience and Interaction research center. She is a former dean of the Faculty of Informatics and Information Technologies (FIIT STU). She mentored talented students and participated in various international competitions, advancing several times to the world finals.

The most valuable awards are awards conferred to my great students.

Maria believes in connecting experts from multiple fields and experiences. She was a founder of the Slovak Research Center for Artificial Intelligence — Slovak.AI — and is active in the AI research community, with a particular interest in recommenders and user modelling. She regularly serves as a reviewer for international journals. She is also a steering committee or program committee member of several international conferences, including UMAP, RecSys, IJCAI, The Web Conference and Hypertext.

Maria has participated in more than 30 research projects, mostly as principal investigator. She continually strives to be involved in international projects. Recently, she participated in projects with Bar Ilan University, Lugano University and British Columbia University. She was an initiator of industrial collaborations at FIIT STU and secured funding for more than ten industrial projects.

I have supervised up to now more than 90 successfully defended final bachelor projects and more than 70 successfully defended master thesis projects. I have been all the time lucky supervised most of the best students of our faculty. I list bellow some of them that were the best among these. Results of almost all projects mentioned bellow were published in scientific journals or international scientific conferences or workshops.