Rate My Professor Katrien Verbert

Katrien Verbert is a Professor of Human-Computer Interaction in the Faculty of Engineering Science at KU Leuven, affiliated with the Department of Computer Science's Human-Computer Interaction research group and the Augment research group. She earned her doctoral degree in Computer Science from KU Leuven in 2008 and subsequently served as a post-doctoral researcher funded by the Research Foundation – Flanders (FWO) at the same institution. Her academic career includes Assistant Professor positions at TU Eindhoven (2013–2014) and Vrije Universiteit Brussel (2014–2015), followed by her return to KU Leuven as Associate Professor, with promotion to full Professor. Verbert is a member of the KU Leuven Research Council, Leuven.AI – KU Leuven Institute for Artificial Intelligence, and DigiSoc – KU Leuven Digital Society Institute. She also holds the role of Program Director for the Proof of Concept Digital Humanities in the Faculty of Engineering Science.

Verbert's research centers on human-centred explainable artificial intelligence, interactive recommender systems, and visual analytics, with applications in learning analytics, healthcare, precision agriculture, media consumption, and digital humanities. She has led or co-led projects such as Explainable AI for Bias Detection in Contested Photographic Heritage Collections (2025–2029), Human-centered Explainable AI (2025–2029), Living Corpora: Pioneering human-AI collaboration in digital humanities (2025–2029), Personal Health Empowerment (ITEA3), and BigDataGrapes (EU H2020). Among her influential publications are "Learning analytics dashboard applications" (Verbert et al., 2013), "Context-aware recommender systems for learning: a survey and future challenges" (Verbert et al., 2012), "Interpretability of machine learning-based prediction models in healthcare" (Stiglic et al., 2020), "Learning dashboards: an overview and future research opportunities" (Verbert et al., 2014), and "Interactive recommender systems: A survey of the state of the art and future research challenges and opportunities" (He, Parra, and Verbert, 2016). She has shaped the field through extensive conference leadership, including program chair for ACM RecSys 2024, ACM IUI 2025, LAK 2020, and general co-chair for IUI 2021, as well as serving as Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Learning Technologies. At KU Leuven, she teaches Fundamentals of Human-Computer Interaction, Information Visualisation, Data Visualisation, and Web Information Systems.