Markus Reiter-Haas

Postdoctoral Associate @ Duke University

Department of Statistical Science
214 Old Chemistry
Box 90251
Durham, NC 27708-0251
USA

markus.reiter-haas@duke.edu

About Me

Markus Reiter-Haas is a postdoctoral associate at the Polarization Lab at Duke University. There, his research focuses on modelling user attitudes, their behavior and their generated content using randomized controlled trials together with large language models in social media environments. He holds a PhD degree with distinction in computer science from the Institute of Interactive Systems and Data Science at Graz University of Technology. In his dissertation, he developed computational methods to understand the framing of textual data in polarized online media. Hence, he is experienced working in interdisciplinary teams and integrating social science theories with machine learning approaches. Besides, he has an extensive computer science background with over 18 years of programming experience and as a data scientist in the industry responsible for an information retrieval system.

Research Interests

Natural Language Processing and Transformers, Embeddings and Item Representations, Information Retrieval and Recommender Systems, Framing and Polarization

Education

2020-2024 PhD in Computer Science
Graz University of Technology
Thesis: “Computational Framing Analysis for Polarized Topics Online”
Passed with distinction

2017–2020 Master in Computer Science
Graz University of Technology
Thesis: “Evaluation of Job Recommendations for the Studo Jobs Platform” Main Specialization: Knowledge Technologies
Secondary Specialization: Multimedia Information Systems
Passed with distinction

2012–2017 Bachelor in Computer Science
Graz University of Technology
Catrobat Project: Timesheet Plugin for Jira
Passed with distinction

2006–2011 Technical College in Computer Science
HTBLA Kaindorf an der Sulm
Passed with distinction

Experience

2024-now PostDoc
Duke University
The Polarization Lab (Joint Lab of the department of Statistical Science, Political Science, and Sociology)

2020–2024 University Assistant
Graz University of Technology
Research Focus: NLP in Social Systems

2017-2020 Data Scientist
Moshbit GmbH (Talto - Talents of Tomorrow)
Research on deeplearning for job recommenders
Funded by FFG (national funding agency)

2013-2017 Student Assistant
Graz University of Technology
Fundementals in Computer Science

2011-2012 Civilian Service
Emergency call dispatching for fire brigades

2008-2010 Summer Internships
GUEP (2010), Joanneum Research (2009), Siemens (2008)

Teaching

2022W-2023W Advanced Information Retrieval
Lecturer WS23 (PyTorch 4 Deeplearning, Transformers 4 IR - Reranking and Retrieval)
Lecturer WS22 (Transformer 4 IR Hands-on Tutorial)
Projects WS22 (Showcase) and WS23 (Showcase)

2022W-2023W Research Meetings within the Recommender Systems and Social Computing Lab
Organization, Unit on academic publishing

2022W SemEval 2023 Challenge Team
1st place on Spanisch Framing Detection

2021W Web Technology
Practicals + Lecture Unit

2021S Social Media Course @ Uni Graz
Guest Lecture
Social Media and Digital Trace Data

2020S Know-Center Summer School
Invited Speaker
Polarization

Co-Supervision

2023S Alexander Ertl - Master Thesis
Contrastive Pre-Training of Transformer Models for Computational Framing Analysis

2022W Lukas Preitler - Bachelor Thesis
Topic Description: Word Embedding Association Test to Reveal Gender Bias in Austrian Teaching Literature

Skills

Main Programming Languages

2012-present Python

-present JavaScript

2006-2021 Java

2017-2020 Kotlin

Natural Languages

German: Native
English: C1

Research

Publications

2024

Reiter-Haas, M. (2024).
Computational Framing Analysis for Polarized Topics Online.
PhD thesis.

Kowald, D., Reiter-Haas, M., Kopeinik, S., Schedl, M., & Lex, E. (2024).
Transparent Music Preference Modeling and Recommendation with a Model of Human Memory Theory.
In A Human-Centered Perspective of Intelligent Personalized Environments and Systems (pp. 113-136). Cham: Springer Nature Switzerland.

Reiter-Haas, M., Klösch, B., Hadler, M., & Lex, E. (2024).
Computational Narrative Framing: Towards Identifying Frames through Contrasting the Evolution of Narrations.
In Proceedings of the Text2Story’24 Workshop, Glasgow (Scotland), 24-March-2024.

Reiter-Haas, M., & Lex, E. (2024).
The Framing Loop: Do Users Repeatedly Read Similar Framed News Online?
In Joint Proceedings of the ACM IUI Workshops 2024, March 18-21, 2024, Greenville, South Carolina, USA.

Reiter-Haas, M., Klösch, B., Hadler, M., & Lex, E. (2024).
FrameFinder: Explorative Multi-Perspective Framing Extraction from News Headlines.
In Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of Human Information Interaction and Retreival (CHIIR ‘24), 381-385.

Reiter-Haas, M., Klösch, B., Hadler, M., & Lex, E. (2024).
Framing Analysis of Health-Related Narratives: Conspiracy versus Mainstream Media.
arXiv preprint arXiv:2401.10030.

2023

Reiter-Haas, M., Ertl, A., Innerebner, K., & Lex, E. (2023).
mCPT at SemEval-2023 Task 3: Multilingual Label-Aware Contrastive Pre-Training of Transformers for Few-and Zero-shot Framing Detection.
In Proceedings of the 17th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval-2023), pages 941–949, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.

Reiter-Haas, M. (2023).
Exploration of Framing Biases in Polarized Online Content Consumption.
Companion Proceedings of the ACM Web Conference 2023, 560–564. Presented at the Austin, TX, USA.

Reiter-Haas, M., Klösch, B., Hadler, M., & Lex, E. (2023).
Polarization of opinions on COVID-19 measures: Integrating Twitter and survey data.
Social Science Computer Review, 41(5), 1811-1835.

Klösch, B., Hadler, M., Reiter-Haas, M., & Lex, E. (2023).
Polarized opinions on Covid-19 and environmental policy measures. The role of social media use and personal concerns in German-speaking countries.
Innovation: The European Journal of Social Science Research, 1-24.

2022

Hadler, M., Klösch, B., Reiter-Haas, M., & Lex, E. (2022).
Combining Survey and Social Media Data: Respondents’ Opinions on COVID-19 Measures and Their Willingness to Provide Their Social Media Account Information.
Frontiers in Sociology, 7.

Klösch, B., Hadler, M., Reiter-Haas, M., & Lex, E. (2022).
Social desirability and the willingness to provide social media accounts in surveys. The case of environmental attitudes.

2021

Reiter-Haas, M., Parada-Cabaleiro, E., Schedl, M., Motamedi, E., Tkalcic, M., & Lex, E. (2021, September).
Predicting Music Relistening Behavior Using the ACT-R Framework.
In Fifteenth ACM Conference on Recommender Systems (pp. 702-707).

Reiter-Haas, M., Kopeinik, S., & Lex, E. (2021, May).
Studying Moral-based Differences in the Framing of Political Tweets.
In Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (Vol. 15, pp. 1085-1089).

Reiter-Haas, M., Klösch, B., Hadler, M., & Lex, E. (2021).
Opinion Polarization on COVID-19 Measures: Integrating Surveys and Social Media Data
(No. 6127). EasyChair.

2020

Reiter-Haas, M., Klösch, B., Hadler, M., & Lex, E. (2020).
Bridging the Gap of Polarization in Public Opinion on Misinformed Topics.
Challenging Misinformation: Exploring Limits and Approaches, workshop co-located with Social Informatics’20

Reiter-Haas, M., Wittenbrink, D., & Lacic, E. (2020, September).
On the Heterogeneous Information Needs in the Job Domain: A Unified Platform for Student Career.
In Fourteenth ACM Conference on Recommender Systems (pp. 573-574).

Reiter-Haas, M. (2020).
Evaluation of Job Recommendations for the Studo Jobs Platform.
MA thesis.

Lacic, E., Reiter-Haas, M., Kowald, D., Dareddy, M. R., Cho, J., & Lex, E. (2020).
Using autoencoders for session-based job recommendations.
In User Modeling and User-Adapted Interaction, 1-42.

2019

Reiter-Haas, M., Lacic, E., Duricic, T., Slawicek, V., & Lex, E. (2019).
Should we Embed? A Study on the Online Performance of Utilizing Embeddings for Real-Time Job Recommendations.
In Proceedings of the 13th ACM Conference on Recommender Systems (pp. 496-500). ACM.

2018

Lacic, E., Kowald, D., Reiter-Haas M., Slawicek, V., & Lex, E. (2018).
Beyond Accuracy Optimization: On the Value of Item Embeddings for Student Job Recommendations.
In the International Workshop on Multi-dimensional Information Fusion for User Modeling and Personalization (IFUP’2018) co-located with the 11th ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining (WSDM’2018)

2017

Reiter-Haas, M., Slawicek, V. & Lacic, E. (2017).
Studo Jobs: Enriching Data With Predicted Job Labels.
In Workshop on Recommender Systems and Social Network Analysis (RS-SNA’2017) co-located with i-KNOW’2017

Funding

2024

Research funding programme for International Communication
Austrian Research Association (Österreichische Forschungsgemeinschaf)
For the participation at the Text2Story Workshop at ECIR’24.

Travel grant for scientists (Reisekostenzuschuss für WissenschafterInnen)
Office of the Styrian Government (Amt der Steiermärkischen Landesregierung)
For the participation at CHIIR’24.

2023

The Framing of the Climate Debate: Computational Framing Analysis using Abstract Meaning Representation.
TU Graz: Initial funding program, 18th call.
As part of the consortium. Funding for 1 student assistant.

Erasmus+ Staff Mobility for Training
Host Institution: Bulgarian Academy of Sciences
For the 2nd Summer school on Deep Learning in Natural Language Processing 2023.

Travel grant for scientists (Reisekostenzuschuss für WissenschafterInnen)
Office of the Styrian Government (Amt der Steiermärkischen Landesregierung)
For the participation in symposium at The Web Conference 2023.

Program Committee/Reviewer

2024 SIGIR’24 (Short papers), RecSys’24 (Long + Short)

2023 ACL’23, SIGIR’23 (Full + Short papers), SemEval’23 (Task 3), RecSys’23 (Long + Short), EMNLP’23, Frontiers in Big Data (Recommender Systems - Reviews in Recommender Systems: 2022), WSDM’24, TheWebConf’24 UMAP track

2022 SIGIR’22 Long papers, RecSys’22 Main, EMNLP’22, WSDM’23, TheWebConf’23 UMAP track (among Best Reviewers)

2021 IUI’22 Main, IUI’22 Posters, RecSys’21 Main, RecSys’21 LBR, TheWebConf’22 WMCA track, SSCR

2020 IUI’21

Conference Attendence

2024

Workshop @ ECIR’24 - Presentation in the Text2Story’24 workshop

Workshop @ IUI’24 - Presentation in the Joint Workshop of HUMANIZE’24 and SOCIALIZE’24

Demo @ CHIIR’24 - Presentation and Demonstration of the FrameFinder Tool

Workshop @ WSDM’24 - Presentation in the Psychology-informed Information Access Systems Workshop (PsyIAS)

2023

Attendee @ RANLP’23 - Write-Up on LLMs

Session Chair @ TheWebConf’23 - User Modeling and Personalization: Privacy Preserving Recommendation, Contrastive Learning & Web Accessibility

Presenter @ TheWebConf’23 - PhD Symposium: Exploration of Framing Biases in Polarized Online Content Consumption

2022

Poster @ GraML - Opening Event (2022)

Poster @ ACSD’22 - Computational Framing Analysis in Online Media

Session Chair @ TheWebConf’22 - Web Mining and Content Analysis: Social 2

Attendee @ CHIIR’22

2021

Poster @ RecSys’21 - Predicting music relistening behavior using the ACT-R framework

Poster @ IC2S2’21 - Opinion Polarization on COVID-19 Measures: Integrating Surveys and Social Media Data

Poster @ ICWSM’21 - Studying Moral-based Differences in the Framing of Political Tweets

2020

Industry Talk @ RecSys’20 - On the Heterogeneous Information Needs in the Job Domain: A Unified Platform for Student Career

Workshop @ SocInfo’20 - Bridging the gap of polarization in public opinion on misinformed topics

Projects

2020 - 2024 Polarization in Public Opinion
Interdisciplinary project together with University of Graz

Press

2020 Polarization in the COVID-19 debate. (in German)
Informationsdienst Wissenschaft e.V. -idw- 2020.

PhD-specific Education

PhD Curricular

2020W Scientific Writing for PhD students (C1-level)

2020W Scientific Presentation for PhD students (C1-level)

2020W Scientific Methods

2020W Data Integration and Large-Scale Analysis - Apache SystemDS - PR-1169

2020S Architecture of Machine Learning System - Apache SystemDS - PR-993

PhD Extra-Curricular

2021S Scientific Writing: From a Blank Page to the Finished Paper

2021S Clear Scientific Writing

2020S Natural Language Processing - RecSys Challenge Twitter Engagement

PhD Coaching

2024S Career Planning - What are my further career moves?

2023W High Potential Coaching - Boost your Productivity

2022S High Potential Coaching - Efficient and Resilient to Your Dissertation

2022S High Potential Coaching - Develop your personal strategy for a successful PhD

2022W Meeting Point Dissertation Workshop - Time and Self-Management

Summer Schools

2023S 2nd Summer school on Deep Learning in Natural Language Processing 2023
co-located with RANLP’23
Focus on the Transformer architecture and large language models (LLMs)

2022S SICSS-Aachen-Graz - Project: Rally ‘round the institution

2024S Didactics Workshop
(Comprising Performance assessment: from product to process, Professional relationship work in teaching, and Coaching skills for teaching)

2023W-2024S Teaching Academy Module Expert
(Teaching community contribution at teaching conference, eCampus use case)

2023S OER Practitioner

2022W-2023S Teaching Academy Module Advanced
(Comprising Competent Testing, Digitization in Teaching, Higher Education Didactics 3, and Teaching in English among others)

2021W Teaching Academy Module Basic
(Comprising Teaching at TU Graz, Higher Education Didactics 1 and 2: Basics of Teaching and Learning/Teaching Courses)