PhD defense of Ibrahim Al Hazwani
Congratulations to Ibrahim Al Hazwani for defending his PhD Thesis “Humanizing Recommender System – Interactive and Explanatory Recommendation through Data Humanism” 🎉
In his dissertation, Ibrahim Al Hazwani argues that explanation in recommender systems is not solely an algorithmic challenge, nor solely a human-centered one, but also, and critically, a design challenge: even when explanations are algorithmically sound and grounded in user needs, the field has invested comparatively little in the visual and interactional form through which they reach users.
To address this gap, Ibrahim adopts Data Humanism as a design language. Ibrahim operationalizes this approach across five interactive recommender systems, spanning point-of-interest, music, furniture, and accommodation recommendation, to assess whether Data Humanism’s principles can be translated into functioning explanatory experiences, and to surface the design trade-offs that emerge when they are.
Ibrahim Al Hazwani was a PhD student in the Interactive Visual Data Analysis Group of Prof. Jürgen Bernard.