Lucien Heitz

PhD Student

Phone: +41 44 635 71 30
Address: Department of Informatics, Binzmühlestrasse 14, CH-8050 Zürich
Room number: BIN 2.D.09

E-Mail

Short Bio

I joined the DDIS group at the Department of Informatics at UZH as a PhD student to continue my work on the news project Informfully. The main goals of my research project are 1.) exploring the normative and theoretical dimensions of diversity of news recommendations, 2.) the algorithmic operationalization of diversity in news, and 3.) conducting user experiments to test the impact of such recommendation algorithms on society.

I have a BA in Philosophy and a MSc in Informatics. Before going to university, I worked as a software developer and acquired a federal VET diploma in application development. I am honored to have received a scholarship of the Digital Society Initiative and to to be a part of the DSI Excellence Program.

You can find me here Google Scholar, ResearchGate, and X.

Research Project

Informfully Research Platform for Reproducible Science

Informfully Community on GitHub

Research Interests

Recommender systems, digital democracy, computational social science, and philosophy of information.

Publications

Lucien Heitz, Julian A. Croci, Madhav Sachdeva, Abraham Bernstein, Informfully - Research Platform for Reproducible User Studies. In: Proceedings of the 18th ACM Conference on Recommender Systems, Bari, Italy, 2024.

Lucien Heitz, Oana Inel, Sanne Vrijenhoek, Recommendations for the Recommenders: Reflections on Prioritizing Diversity in the RecSys Challenge. In: Proceedings of the Recommender Systems Challenge 2024, Bari, Italy, 2024.

Lucien Heitz, Abraham Bernstein, Luca Rossetto, An Empirical Exploration of Perceived Similarity between News Article Texts and Images. In: Working Notes Proceedings of the 14th Annual MediaEval Workshop, Amsterdam, The Netherlands and Online, 2024.

Lucien Heitz, Yuin Kwan Chan, Hongji Li, Kerui Zeng, Luca Rossetto, Abraham Bernstein, Prompt-based Alignment of Headlines and Images Using OpenCLIP. In: Working Notes Proceedings of the 14th Annual MediaEval Workshop, Amsterdam, The Netherlands and Online, 2024.

Lucien Heitz, Juliane A. Lischka, Laura Laugwitz, Hendrik Meyer, Rana Abdullah, Abraham Bernstein, Deliberative Diversity for News Recommendations: Operationalization and Experimental User Study. In: Proceedings of 17th ACM Conference on Recommender Systems, Singapore, Singapore, 2023.

Lucien Heitz, Classification of Normative Recommender Systems. In: Proceedings of the First Workshop on the Normative Design and Evaluation of Recommender Systems co-located with the 17th ACM Conference on Recommender Systems, Singapore, Singapore, 2023.

Lucien Heitz, Juliane A. Lischka, Alena Birrer, Bibek Paudel, Suzanne Tolmeijer, Laura Laugwitz, Abraham Bernstein, Benefits of Diverse News Recommendations for Democracy: A User Study. In: Digital Journalism Special Issue, Exploring the Normative Dimension, Digital Journalism, Vol. 10 (10), p. 1710–1730, 2022.

Lucien Heitz, Krisztina Rozgonyi, Bojana Kostic, AI in Content Curation and Media Pluralism. In: Spotlight on Artificial Intelligence and Freedom of Expression – A Policy Manual, Office of the Representative on Freedom of the Media Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), Vienna, Austria, p. 56–70, 2022.

Luca Rossetto, Matthias Baumgartner, Ralph Gasser, Lucien Heitz, Ruijie Wang, Abraham Bernstein, Exploring Graph-Querying Approaches in LifeGraph. In: Proceedings of the 4th Annual on Lifelog Search Challenge. Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, p. 7–10, 2021.

Luca Rossetto, Matthias Baumgartner, Narges Ashena, Florian Ruosch, Romana Pernisch, Lucien Heitz, Abraham Bernstein, VideoGraph – Towards Using Knowledge Graphs for Interactive Video Retrieval. In: Proceedings of 27th International Conference on Multimedia Modeling, Springer, Cham, Switzerland, p. 417–422, 2021.

Abraham Bernstein, Claes de Vreese, Natali Helberger, Wolfgang Schulz, Katharina Zweig, Christian Baden, Michael A. Beam, Marc P. Hauer, Lucien Heitz, Pascal Jürgens, Christian Katzenbach, Benjamin Kille, Beate Klimkiewicz, Wiebke Loosen, Judith Moeller, Goran Radanovic, Guy Shani, Nava Tintarev, Suzanne Tolmeijer, Wouter van Atteveldt, Sanne Vrijenhoek, and Theresa Zueger: Diversity in News Recommendation. In: Dagstuhl Manifestos, Schloss Dagstuhl - Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik, Vol. 9 (1), p. 43–61, 2021.

Conferences, Workshops, and Events

Informfully – Research Platform for Content Recommendations & Case Study on Nudging of Environment News at the Societal Analytics Lab Workshop, December 4, 2023. Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands (website).

Informfully – Research Platform for Content Recommendations & Case Study on the Effects of Overexposure of Minority Parties in Political News, workshop presentation, Digital Democracy Workshop 2023, October 26–27, 2023. University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland (website).

Deliberative Diversity for News Recommendations: Operationalization and Experimental User Study, poster at the 17th ACM Conference Series on Recommender Systems, September 18–22, 2023. Singapore, Singapore (website).

Classification of Normative Recommender Systems, workshop presentation at the NORMalize Workshop on the Normative Design and Evaluation of Recommender Systems, 17^th ACM Conference Series on Recommender Systems, September 19, 2023. Singapore, Singapore (website).

When Recommender Systems Select Political News: Effects of Algorithmic News Curation on Party Preferences, presentation at the Recommendations Matters: Impact of Algorithm-Powered News Recommendation Systems Track, 73^rd Annual ICA Conference, May 25–29, 2023. Ontario, Canada (website).

Informfully: Infrastructure for News Recommender System Research, guest talk at the Political Communication & Computational Methods Seminar, March 27–31, 2023. Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands (website).

Liquid Democracy Workshop, co-organizer of the DemocracyNet Workshop Series, December 15–16, 2022. University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland (website).

Framework for Creating and Assessing Diversity in News Recommender Systems, workshop presentation at the Diverse News Recommenders: From Concept to Implementation Session, Lorentz Center Scientific Workshops, November 20–25, 2022. University of Leiden, Leiden, The Netherlands (website).

When AI Selects Political News: Algorithmic Content Curation and Party Plurality, presentation at the Understanding the Dynamics of (Ir)Responsible AI in Journalism and Algorithmically Shaped News Flows Track, 72^nd Annual ICA Conference, May 26, 2022. Paris, France (website)

SAIFE Policy Manual Launch Event, rapporteur for Office of the OSCE Representative on Freedom of the Media, January 26, 2022. Virtual event (website).

Exploring Graph-Querying Approaches in LifeGraph, presentation and challenge participant at the Lifelog Search Challenge 2021, ACM International Conference on Multimedia Retrieval, November 19, 2021. Virtual event (website).

Benefits of Diverse News Recommendations for Democracy, presentation at the Algorithms and News Track, Future of Journalism Conference 2021, September 22–24, 2021. Virtual conference (website).

AI & Freedom of Expression Workshop on Media Pluralism, rapporteur for the SAIFE Spotlight Initiative June 23, Office of the OSCE Representative on Freedom of the Media, 2021. Virtual workshop (website).

VideoGraph – Towards Using Knowledge Graphs for Interactive Video Retrieval, presentation and challenge participant at the Video Browser Showdown 2021, 27^th ACM International Conference on Multimedia Modeling, June 22, 2021. Prague, Czech Republic (website).

Diversity-optimized Political News Recommender System for Online and Social Media Platforms, presentation at the Young Scholars in Computational Social Science Workshop, November 19–20, 2020. Virtual workshop (website).

Normative Recommenders and News Consumption, presentation at the Digital Democracy Workshop 2020, November 5–6, 2020. Virtual workshop (website).