Staff Research Scientist

Spotify

News

My career

For a brief and compact overview, take a look at my 1-page CV.

I joined Spotify in August 2021, initially for a sabbatical and then switching to a permanent role in April 2022 as Staff Research Scientist.

I worked as a faculty member (first as Assistant Professor, since 2018 as Associate Professor and 2021-2023 part-time) at the Web Information Systems group, Delft University of Technology between 2013 and 2023. Between 2011 and 2012 I was a Postdoc in the same group. I received my PhD in 2010 from the University of Twente, where I worked in the Human Media Interaction group. The Otto-von-Guericke University of Magdeburg in Germany was my home during my undergraduate years as a student in computer science. In the past, I have worked on a variety of topics in the fields of information retrieval & data science, including query performance prediction (the topic of my PhD thesis), social search, computational social science, learning to search and IR for specific user groups.

I have diverse research interests and am always happy to dive into a new area. Together with a number of PhD students at TU Delft I was focused on how to incorporate search into the human learning process at scale, collaborative search, and conversational search. In 2016 and 2017 I received two prestigious personal grants from the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) with a total funding of more than 1 million euros; this translates into 4-5 PhD/postdoc positions in the developing “search as learning” research area. Take a look at the Dagstuhl Seminar I co-organized on the topic to get an idea of what it is about.

In 2018, I gave an invited keynote at the French IR conference CORIA 2018 on the topic of search as learning.

In 2021, I gave an invited keynote at the MICROS workshop, co-hosted at ECIR 2021 on the topic of conversational search.

Contact

Email: claudia.hauff[at]gmail.com

Past members of my TU Delft lab

TU Delft lab software

  • LogUI: A contemporary, framework-agnostic JavaScript library for logging user interactions on webpages. Lead developer is David Maxwell.
  • ELAT: EdX Logfile Analysis Tool that is browser-based, and a fully local processing tool. No server needed, no programming knowledge needed, no setup costs. Lead developer is Manuel Valle Torre.
  • SearchX is a scalable collaborative search system, developed to research large-scale search and sensemaking experiments. Lead developer is Felipe Moraes.
  • APONE is an academic environment for online experiments, that we have used in our research and teaching. Lead developer is Mónica Marrero.
  • SIREN is a simulation framework for understanding the effects of recommender systems in online news environments. Lead developer is Dimitrios Bountouridis.

Grants

  • NWO Aspasia grant (100,000€) as a top-up of my NWO VIDI (50K for my research, 50K for diversity measures in the faculty), September 2018.
  • NWA Startimpulsprogramma VWData (325,000€) awarded together with 2 co-PIS. A two-year Postdoc position will be funded within a work package that considers fairness in news recommenders.
  • NWO VIDI grant (800,000€) for my proposal SearchX: Integrating search and sensemaking into large-scale open online learning, May 2017 (personal grant, 15% acceptance rate)
  • NWO TOP grant (226,000€) to conduct “innovative or high-risk scientific research that addresses questions of high quality and urgency;” specifically I will push the boundaries of large-scale collaborative search, November 2016 (personal grant, 23% acceptance rate)
  • Grant (33,000€) from the Leiden-Delft-Erasmus Centre for Education and Learning to conduct research on the benefits of eyetracking in massive open online learning, November 2016
  • TU Delft Education Research tender (2,500€, 1 co-PI) to bring real-time teaching and learning analytics into the classroom, July 2016
  • TU Delft Study Success tender (3,000€, 1 co-PI) to further improve teaching in the Bachelor, September 2015
  • TU Delft Blended Education tender (10,000€, 1 co-PI) to improve teaching in the Bachelor, September 2014

Organizational duties and activities