Team

Recommender Systems
Beyond Accuracy Measurements
Generative AI
News Recommendations
Thomas E. Kolb
Predoc Researcher
Thomas E. Kolb is a doctoral researcher and PhD candidate at TU Wien, working in the Christian Doppler Laboratory for Recommender Systems. His dissertation focuses on evaluating news recommender systems beyond accuracy. In particular, he studies how recommendation quality can be understood through stakeholder values, longitudinal effects, and objectives such as diversity, novelty, serendipity, and fairness.
His research combines stakeholder studies, controlled user studies, and applied evaluations in news and information environments. He is interested in how different recommendation policies affect both what users do and how they perceive recommendations over time. His work also explores how insights from news recommender evaluation can inform conversational and generative recommender systems, especially systems grounded in local or domain-specific knowledge.
Alongside his research, Thomas is involved in teaching, thesis supervision, workshop organization, and applied research projects with external partners. He has contributed to courses on recommender systems, social network analysis, and generative AI, and has supervised student work on fairness-aware recommendation, sentiment analysis, content-based recommendation, and retrieval-augmented systems.
Teaching
- 194.210 Recommender Systems and User Modeling 2026
- 194.035 Recommender Systems 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024, 2025, 2026
- 194.050 Social Network Analysis 2021, 2022, 2024
- 194.164 Advanced Topics in Recommender Systems and Generative AI 2024, 2025
Activities & Talks
- Tutorial on “Recent Advances in Generative Conversational Recommender Systems” at RecSys 2025 (YouTube | Recording & Slides) and IJCAI-ECAI 2026 (Slides)
- Visiting Researcher at MediaFutures, Norway
- Organizer at the ACM Summer School on Recommender Systems 2025
- Instructor at the Digital Humanism Summer School 2025 (Rwanda)
- Co-Chair of the LLM4Good Workshop co-located with ACM UMAP 2025
- Speaker at the Parliamentary Administration: “Generative AI in legislative consultation procedures”
- Speaker at “Lehrende helfen Lehrenden” at TU Wien for our lecture “Social Network Analysis”
- Speaker at MediaWiki Users and Developers Conference Fall 2024
- Speaker at ÖVG Herbsttagung 2024
- Organizer at the 3rd ACM Digital Humanism Summer School
- Speaker at AK-Tag 2024 (Anti-Corruption Day of the Federal Bureau of Anti-Corruption)
- Guest Lecture Session at FH Krems (Topic: Recommender Systems): 2024, 2025
- Organizer & Speaker at 2nd ACM Digital Humanism Summer School: Hands-On Session Chat-GPT
- Speaker at ÖAW AI Winter School 2023: Sentiment Analysis
- Participant at RecSys Summer School 2023
- Student Volunteer at the 16th ACM Conference on Recommender Systems
- Speaker at Workshop: Österreichisches Treffen zu Sentimentinferenz (ÖTSI) Österreichische Linguistik-Tagung 2021: Sentiment Analysis
Voluntary Engagement
- Reviewer for RecSys ’26 – Main Track, RecSys ’25 – LBR Track, ACM Transactions on Recommender Systems (TORS), Information Technology & Tourism (JITT) and KONVENS
- Senate at TU Wien
- Since 07/2025: Chairmen of the Doctoral Student Representation Council at TU Wien
- Since 11/2024: Member of the Association to support Digital Humanism
- Since 05/2022: Student Advisor (Representation of Interests of Doctoral Candidates at TU Wien)
- Study commission for doctoral students
- Since 03/2020: System Administrator/Architect (Students’ Union at the TU Wien – Department for Digitalization and Infrastructure)
- Since 07/2010: (Voluntary) Firefighter (IT-Representative)
Supervisions
- Analysing Dynamics Over Time of Bias in Recommender Systems (in progress). Boris Staykov. Master’s Thesis.
- Automated Fine-Grained Location Tagging in Online News (in progress). Master’s Thesis.
- Data Transformation Tool to Explore News Recommenders (in progress). Manuel Feuerstein. Bachelor’s Thesis.
- Intent Discovery and Product Search for Price Comparison Sites (in progress). Master’s Thesis.
- POI Recommender Systems for Customized Walking Tours Using Context and Category (in progress). Joanna Zamiechowska. Master’s Thesis.
- Enhancing Video Segment Discovery in Educational Content: A Conversational Approach with Retrieval-Augmented Generation (in progress). Dragana Naceva. Master’s Thesis.
- Evaluating Agentic Retrieval Augmented Generation in Open Tender Evaluations (in progress). Franz Ottitsch. Master’s Thesis.
- Evaluating the Fairness of News Recommender Algorithms Within Detected User Communities (completed). Bernhard Steindl. 2024. Master’s Thesis.
- Exploration of Content-Based Cross-Domain Podcast Recommender Systems (completed). Matthias Hofmaier. 2024. Master’s Thesis.
- Exploring the Sentiment Patterns of Clustered COVID-19 News Articles on Mask Requirements: A Comparison with User Comments (completed). Lukas Burtscher. 2023. Bachelor’s Thesis.
- Content-Based Restaurant Recommendation Systems Using Textual and Visual Data (completed). Dante Godolja. 2023. Bachelor’s Thesis.
- Exploring Group Fairness in News Media Recommendations: Algorithms, Metrics, and Grouping (completed). Blake Huebner. 2023. Master’s Thesis.
- COVID-19 and Populism in Austrian News User Comments – A Machine Learning Approach (completed). Ahmadou Wagne. 2023. Master’s Thesis.
- K-Means Clustering of Fashion Behavior: A Language-Focused Approach (completed). Florian Dedov. 2022. Bachelor’s Thesis.
Publications
2026
Exploring Revealed Behavior and Stated Profiles in Longitudinal News Recommendation Proceedings Article Forthcoming
In: Proceedings of the 20th ACM Conference on Recommender Systems (RecSys '26), Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Forthcoming.
When Should Recommender Systems Not Act? Proceedings Article Forthcoming
In: Proceedings of the 20th ACM Conference on Recommender Systems (RecSys '26), Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Forthcoming.
Interaction Modality and Trust: Investigating System-Driven Conversational Recommendation and Faceted Search Proceedings Article Forthcoming
In: Proceedings of the 20th ACM Conference on Recommender Systems, Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Forthcoming.
Conversational Recommender Systems Using Generative Models (Gen-CRS): A Literature Review Journal Article
In: ACM Trans. Recomm. Syst., 2026, ISSN: 2770-6699.
Prompt to Press: Evaluating Human Perception of AI Involvement in News Writing Across Prompt Specificity Proceedings Article
In: Companion Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces, pp. 89–92, Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 2026, ISBN: 9798400719851.
LLM4Good: The 2nd Workshop on Sustainable and Trustworthy Large Language Models for Personalization Proceedings Article
In: Proceedings of the 34th ACM Conference on User Modeling, Adaptation and Personalization, pp. 684–687, Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 2026, ISBN: 9798400723117.
2025
Beyond Demographics: Evaluating News Recommender Systems Fairness Through Behavioural Communities Proceedings Article
In: Adjunct Proceedings of the 33rd ACM Conference on User Modeling, Adaptation and Personalization, pp. 13–17, Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 2025, ISBN: 9798400713996.
A Tutorial on Recent Advances in Generative Conversational Recommender Systems Proceedings Article
In: Proceedings of the Nineteenth ACM Conference on Recommender Systems, pp. 1420–1422, Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 2025, ISBN: 9798400713644.
Bridging Preferences: Multi-Stakeholder Insights on Ideal News Recommendations Proceedings Article
In: Proceedings of the 33rd ACM Conference on User Modeling, Adaptation and Personalization, pp. 268–272, Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 2025, ISBN: 9798400713132.
LLM4Good: The 1st Workshop on Sustainable and Trustworthy Large Language Models for Personalization Proceedings Article
In: Adjunct Proceedings of the 33rd ACM Conference on User Modeling, Adaptation and Personalization, pp. 385–387, Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 2025, ISBN: 9798400713996.
2024
PopAut: An Annotated Corpus for Populism Detection in Austrian News Comments Proceedings Article
In: Calzolari, Nicoletta; Kan, Min-Yen; Hoste, Veronique; Lenci, Alessandro; Sakti, Sakriani; Xue, Nianwen (Ed.): Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024), pp. 12879–12892, ELRA and ICCL, Torino, Italy, 2024.
Unlocking the Potential of Content-Based Restaurant Recommender Systems Proceedings Article
In: Berezina, Katerina; Nixon, Lyndon; Tuomi, Aarni (Ed.): Information and Communication Technologies in Tourism 2024, pp. 239–244, Springer Nature Switzerland, Cham, 2024, ISBN: 978-3-031-58839-6.
Classifying User Roles in Online News Forums: A Model for User Interaction and Behavior Analysis Proceedings Article
In: Adjunct Proceedings of the 32nd ACM Conference on User Modeling, Adaptation and Personalization, pp. 240–249, Association for Computing Machinery, Cagliari, Italy, 2024, ISBN: 9798400704666.
Navigating Serendipity – An Experimental User Study On The Interplay of Trust and Serendipity In Recommender Systems Proceedings Article
In: Adjunct Proceedings of the 32nd ACM Conference on User Modeling, Adaptation and Personalization, pp. 386–393, Association for Computing Machinery, Cagliari, Italy, 2024, ISBN: 9798400704666.
Evaluating Group Fairness in News Recommendations: A Comparative Study of Algorithms and Metrics Proceedings Article
In: Adjunct Proceedings of the 32nd ACM Conference on User Modeling, Adaptation and Personalization, pp. 337–346, Association for Computing Machinery, Cagliari, Italy, 2024, ISBN: 9798400704666.
Enhancing Cross-Domain Recommender Systems with LLMs: Evaluating Bias and Beyond-Accuracy Measures Proceedings Article
In: Proceedings of the 18th ACM Conference on Recommender Systems, pp. 1388–1394, Association for Computing Machinery, Bari, Italy, 2024, ISBN: 9798400705052.
2023
Like a Skilled DJ – an Expert Study on News Recommendations Beyond Accuracy Proceedings Article
In: Kille, Benjamin (Ed.): CEUR-WS.org, 2023.
Potentials of Combining Local Knowledge and LLMs for Recommender Systems Proceedings Article
In: Anelli, Vito Walter; Basile, Pierpaolo; Melo, Gerard De; Donini, Francesco; Ferrara, Antonio; Musto, Cataldo; Narducci, Fedelucio; Ragone, Azzurra; Zanker, Markus (Ed.): pp. 61–64, CEUR-WS.org, 2023.
Hands-on Session ChatGPT Miscellaneous
2023.
Sentiment Analysis Miscellaneous
2023.
2022
The ALPIN Sentiment Dictionary: Austrian Language Polarity in Newspapers Proceedings Article
In: pp. 4708–4716, European Language Resources Association, Marseille, France, 2022.
The Role of Bias in News Recommendation in the Perception of the Covid-19 Pandemic Proceedings Article
In: Thomas, Kolb (Ed.): 2022.
2021
A review and cluster analysis of German polarity resources for sentiment analysis Proceedings Article
In: 3rd Conference on Language, Data and Knowledge (LDK 2021), pp. 1–17, OASICS, 93, 2021, ISBN: 978-3-95977-199-3.
Creating an Austrian language polarity dictionary with the crowd Miscellaneous
2021.
