About

Hi there, I’m Niklas!

I’m a Full Professor of Information Systems and Human-Centric Artificial Intelligence at the University of Bayreuth. I also lead a research group at Fraunhofer FIT, direct the Research Center Finance & Information Management (FIM), serve as Senior Expert AI at IBM, lecture at the Technical University of Munich (TUM), and direct the AI Responsibility Centre (ARC) — bridging academic research with applied work across institutions and industry; and with prior practical experience as a Managing Consultant in Data Science.

My research sits at the interface of machine learning and human-centric design. I believe that inventive AI applications — and their successful, fair, and robust adoption — require both a deep technical understanding of ML methods and a serious engagement with how people actually work with these systems. Treating either side as an afterthought tends to produce technology that fails in the field, even when it looks good on a benchmark.

Concretely, my current work focuses on:

Appropriate reliance on AI — when people should rely on AI decisions, when they shouldn’t, and how expertise, interfaces, and explanations shape that judgment.
Human-AI complementarity — designing teamwork between humans and AI systems so that the combination outperforms either alone, particularly in high-stakes domains like medicine.
Explainable AI in practice — moving beyond generic XAI methods toward explanations that actually support the decisions clinicians, analysts, and other domain experts need to make.
Fairness and societal implications — examining how AI systems distribute benefits and harms, and what responsible deployment requires.

I aim to develop these themes further and communicate them to students, industry, and society.

If you’re interested in working with me, please feel free to get in touch. To learn more, explore the links below: