Dr.-Ing. Sidra Naveed

Teaching: Human-Centric AI

Master’s thesis topics for students: Human-centric AI, Explainable AI (XAI), Recommender Systems, Interactive and Intelligent Systems Design.

Dr.-Ing. Sidra Naveed is a Postdoctoral Researcher and EU Projects Coordinator at the Chair of Information Systems and New Media at the University of Siegen, specialising in Human-Centered AI, Explainable AI, Recommender Systems, and Interactive Systems Design.

Her research focuses on making intelligent systems transparent, controllable, and accountable to the people who use them — understanding explainability not as a technical property of a system, but as a fundamentally user-centred challenge. She is especially interested in grounding AI explanations in users' own mental models, prompting large language models to generate human-interpretable outputs, and studying human–machine collaboration in real socio-technical environments such as industrial production settings. This agenda spans participatory, practice-oriented design and rigorous empirical evaluation across domains including recommender systems, generative AI, and AI literacy.

She has extensive experience coordinating large-scale European research consortia, having served as Project Coordinator of a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Innovative Training Network under Horizon 2020 and currently leading an Erasmus+ Cooperation Partnership in Higher Education as Principal Investigator and Project Coordinator — investigating how human-centred AI can be designed and deployed responsibly in higher education and industrial contexts. She successfully completed her doctoral degree in 2021 at the University of Duisburg-Essen with the dissertation titled "An Interactive Hybrid Approach to Generate Explainable and Controllable Recommendations."

Projects:

• EFRE NRW 2021–2027 —Senior Researcher (2026–2028): Co-Pilot in Production: Human-Machine Collaboration in Automated Industrial Production Environments (COPP).

https://www.bikar.com/de_DE/ueber-das-unternehmen/copp

• Erasmus+ KA220-HED — Project Coordinator (2025–2028): Building Digital Competencies for Citizen Participation and Engagement (DigitalCitizen).

https://erasmusdigitalcitizen.com/

• MSCA-ITN GECKO (Horizon 2020) — Project Coordinator (2021–2025): building GrEener and more sustainable soCieties by filling the Knowledge gap in social science and engineering to enable responsible artificial intelligence co-creatiOn (GECKO).

https://gecko-project.eu/

• EFRE NRW 2014-2020 — Lead Researcher: IT-based, user-centred energy optimisation systems for small and medium-sized enterprises (SustainKMU).

https://www.digital-energy.nrw/

• Mittelstand 4.0-Kompetenzzentrum Usability (2025) — Expert AI Trainer: Delivered workshop on human-centred innovation and AI for sustainable digitalisation of SMEs.

Publications:

Forthcoming:

2026

• Mahmood, F., Abid Syed, H., Naveed, S., & Ludwig, T. (2026). Explaining Chatbot Decisions with Enhanced Interactions for User Trust. ECSCW 2026 [To be appear].
• Naveed, S., Shajalal, M., & Stevens, G. (2025). From algorithmic transparency to human sensemaking: User perceptions of word-highlighting-based explanations for fake review detection. HCII 2026 [To be appear].

Published:

2024

• Naveed, S., Robin-kern, D., & Stevens, G. (2024). An Overview of Empirical Evaluation of XAI: A Comprehensive Guideline for User-Centred Evaluation. MDPI Applied Sciences, 14(23). https://www.mdpi.com/2076-3417/14/23/11288

2023

• Robin-kern, D., Stevens, G., Dethier, E., Naveed, S., Alizadeh, F., & Shajalal, M. (2023). Peeking inside the schufa blackbox: Explaining the German housing scoring system. arXiv preprint: 
  https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2311.11655

2022

• Naveed, S., Robin-kern, D., & Stevens, G. (2022). Explainable Robo-Advisors: A User-Centric Taxonomy of Explanations in Financial AI. IntRS @ ACM RecSys 2022. 

https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-3222/paper6.pdf

2021

• Naveed, S. (2021). An Interactive Hybrid Approach to Generate Explainable and Controllable Recommendations. Diss. Duisburg, Essen.

10.17185/duepublico/75001

2020

• Naveed, S., & Ziegler, J. (2020). Featuristic: An Interactive Hybrid System for Explainable Recommendations — Beyond System Accuracy. IntRS @ ACM RecSys 2020. http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2682/paper2.pdf
• Naveed, S., Loepp, B., & Ziegler, J. (2020). On the Use of Feature-Based Collaborative Explanations: An Empirical Comparison. Adjunct Proceedings of ACM UMAP 2020 (pp. 226–232). https://doi.org/10.1145/3386392.3399303

2019

• Millecamp, M., Naveed, S., Verbert, K., & Ziegler, J. (2019). To Explain or Not to Explain: Effects of Personal Characteristics on Feature-Based Recommendations. IntRS @ ACM RecSys 2019.

https://api.semanticscholar.org/CorpusID:203415984

2018

• Naveed, S., Donkers, T., & Ziegler, J. (2018). Argumentation-Based Explanations in Recommender Systems. ACM UMAP 2018. https://api.semanticscholar.org/CorpusID:203415984
• Naveed, S., Donkers, T., & Ziegler, J. (2018). Argumentation-Based Explanations in Recommender Systems: Conceptual Framework and Empirical Results. Adjunct Publication of ACM UMAP 2018 (pp. 292–298).

https://doi.org/10.1145/3213586.3225240

2017

• Jannach, D., Naveed, S., & Jugovac, M. (2017). User Control in Recommender Systems: Overview and Interaction Challenges. EC-Web 2016.

https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-53676-7_2