About our Ph.D. candidate Sanne Vrijenhoek


Sanne is a PhD candidate at the University of Amsterdam’s Institute for Information Law and the AI, Media & Democracy Lab. However, her roots lie completely elsewhere, as Sanne holds a master’s degree in Artificial Intelligence. Between her combined experience as a member of the Lab, PhD at the Law faculty, technical degree and previous work experience as a consultant, Sanne is a truly interdisciplinary researcher.

In her research, Sanne’s main focus is on translating normative notions of diversity into concrete concepts that can be used to inform recommender system design. Central to her work is to involve social sciences, computer sciences, and industry partners in the problem, with the purpose of arriving at a solution that not only makes sense from an academic perspective, but could potentially also work in practice. Her work RADio – Rank-Aware Divergence Metrics to Measure Normative Diversity in News Recommendations was awarded Best Paper Runner Up at RecSys’22, and she was a central part of the organization of the Lorentz workshop Diversity in News Recommendations: from concept to implementation.