Bettina Berendt is a professor in the research group “Declarative Languages and Artificial Intelligence” (DTAI) at the Department of Computer Science of KU Leuven. Her research focuses on Web Mining and its uses and implications. Methodologically, she combines aspects of Web content, Web usage and Web structure mining with methods from the social and behavioural sciences relevant to the respective research questions and applications. The Web materials and platforms include Social Media such as microblogging or social networking sites, as well as (mainstream or other) news sites and the relation between these various channels of information. Research questions include privacy, the public and the private and the role of media in them, information literacy, and how data mining can be developed and deployed in a user-centric fashion for user empowerment in these areas.

Prof. Berendt holds degrees in Computer Science and AI (PhD, University of Hamburg, 1998; M.Sc., University of Edinburgh, 1992), Computer Science/Social Sciences (Habilitation in Information Systems, Humboldt University Berlin, 2003), and Social Sciences (Diplom-Kauffrau / Business Economics, Freie Universität Berlin, 1991; M.Phil. in Economics, University of Cambridge, 1988). Her PhD took a strongly interdisciplinary approach reaching in particular into Cognitive Psychology: it was done in the Graduate Program for Cognitive Science of the University of Hamburg. Many of her publications were and are co-authored by colleagues from the Social and Behavioural Sciences as well as from the Humanities (in particular Linguistics and Bibliometrics), and are products of interdisciplinary projects.

Bettina Berendt has held academic positions in groups, institutes and departments of Computer Science (Artificial Intelligence and Databases/Hypermedia at KU Leuven, since 2007; Knowledge-Based Systems at Jožef Stefan Institute, Ljubjlana, 2007; Computational Visualistics at the University of Magdeburg, 1998; Artificial Intelligence at the University of Hamburg, 1996-1998; Interactive Systems, Freie Universität Berlin, 1993); Social Sciences (Information Systems at Humboldt University Berlin, 2001-2007; Quantitative Methods in Economics at Freie Universität Berlin, 1988-1991); and Behavioural Sciences (Institute for Computer Uses in Education, Humboldt University Berlin, 1998-2001). She has also had teaching commissions in Computer Science (Universidad Politecnica de Madrid, 2007-2009; University of Hamburg, 1994/95; Freie Universität Berlin, 1989-1993). Her teaching in these positions consisted of courses on a range of computational and interdisciplinary topics for single-discipline or mixed groups of students from Computer Science, Social and Behavioural Sciences, and Humanities. She has supervised theses ranging from Bachelor to PhD and Habilitation levels of students from the same range of backgrounds.

Further information including publications can be found at http://people.cs.kuleuven.be/~bettina.berendt/