Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin - Wirtschaftswissenschaftliche Fakultät

Dr. Alona Zharova

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Telephone: +49 30 2093-99544

Email: alona.zharova[at]hu-berlin.de

Office hours: by appointment

Room: SPA1, 336

CV: Download

Research areas

Methods

  • Recommendation systems
  • Multi-agent systems
  • Explainable AI
  • Federated learning  
  • Reinforcement learning

Data-Centric AI

  • Data quality evaluation
  • Cross-domain data quality metrics
  • Active learning

Decision-making Support

  • Complex data visualization techniques

  • Collaboration networks

  • Research performance evaluation

  • Managerial and policy-making decision support

Climate Change Mitigation

  • Smart Home and Smart City

  • Digital twins

  • Energy-efficiency in buildings

  • Demand-side mitigation

 

International ‌Research Stays

  • National University Singapore (Singapore) - 2018
  • Australian National University (Australia) - 2023
  • Universidad de La Habana (Cuba) - 2023
  • Australian National University (Australia) - scheduled 2025

 

Third-party funding and Grants

  • Transfer project “Plattform zur Förderung von Energieeffizienz und CO2-Reduktion in Privathaushalten” funded by the Joachim Herz Stiftung (80000€), 2025
  • Individual Global Partnership Grant for co-funding of a research stay at the Australian National University (ANU), "Recommendation Systems for nudging households in Germany and Australia towards energy-efficient behavior to reduce CO2 emissions", by the DFG through the Strategic Partnerships Program of the Excellence (2500 €), 2025
  • Add-on Fellowship of the Joachim Herz Stiftung in Interdisciplinary Economics and Interdisciplinary Business Administration , “Feldstudie: Nudging von energieeffizientem Verhalten in privaten Haushalten durch Anwendung erklärbarer Multi-Agenten-Empfehlungssysteme”, (15500 €), 2023 – 2025
  • Participating Researcher at the Scientific Network Programme “Management AI”, funded by the DFG (36900 € in total), 2024 - 2026
  • Individual International Connections Grant for a research stay at the Australian National University (ANU), "Nudging Energy-Efficient Behavior in Private Households through the Recommendation Systems", funded by the DFG through the Strategic Partnerships Program of the Excellence (6000 €), 2023
  • Individual Grant for a research stay at the Universidad de La Habana, Kuba (UH), "Sustainable Economic Development and Recommendations Systems supporting Energy-Efficiency in Private Households", funded by the DAAD through the Berlin Center for Global Engagement (BCGE) (4400 €), 2023
  • Co-PI at the project “AI for Energy Finance”, funded by the European Union through the Romania's National Recovery and Resilience Plan (ca. 1.4 Mio. € in total), 2023 - 2026
  • Co-PI at the project “AI Marketer”, funded by the Investitionsbank Berlin (IBB), Program for promoting Research, Innovations and Technologies (ProFIT), (296530 € in total), 2021 - 2023
  • Co-PI at the HU Berlin - National University Singapore (NUS) Joint Research Project in “Augmented Intelligence in Digital Society”, funded by the National University Singapore (NUS) (16500 € in total), 2018 - 2020
  • Individual grant of Erasmus Mundus BMU-MID for 6 months exchange mobility at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (9000 €), 2013 - 2014

 

Teaching

B.Sc.

  • Strategie, Organisation und Information Technology (Lecture & Exercise, ca. 400 students); SoSe23
  • Introduction to Programming in Java (Lecture & Exercise, ca. 200 students); SoSe24, SoSe23, SoSe21, SoSe20, SoSe18 (Exercises available in YouTube, Link)
  • Seminar Wirtschaftsinformatik (24 students); WiSe24-25, SoSe20, SoSe18
  • Statistics II (Exercise, 20 students); WiSe16-17
  • Management Simulation (Simulation Game, 35 students), International Summer School in Economics and Management (ISSEM) of the HU Berlin in Havana, Cuba; SoSe19, SoSe17, SoSe16, SoSe15

M.Sc.

  • Seminar Information Systems, Implementation project (24 students); WiSe24-25, WiSe23-24, WiSe22-23, WiSe20-21
  • Tackling Climate Change with Machine Learning (Lecture), International Summer School in Economics and Management (ISSEM) of the HU Berlin in Havana, Cuba; SoSe23
  • Business Analytics and Data Science (Exercise, ca. 150 students/ 90 exams); WiSe20-21
  • Seminar IT Security and Privacy (40 students); SoSe23
  • Seminar Applied Predictive Analytics (24 students); SoSe24, SoSe21

Ph.D.

  • Research Seminar Information Systems (Ph.D. & selected MSc theses); WiSe23-24, WiSe22-23, SoSe21, WiSe20-21, SoSe20

 

Service

Refereeing activities

  • BISE (Business & Information Systems Engineering) journal, Reviewer
  • Tagung WI (Internationale Tagung Wirtschaftsinformatik), 2024, Associate Editor and Reviewer
  • ECIS (European Conference on Information Systems), 2024, Reviewer
  • Tackling Climate Change with Machine Learning Workshop within NeurIPS (Neural Information Processing Systems), 2024 & 2023, Reviewer & Meta-Reviewer
  • Tackling Climate Change with Machine Learning Workshop within ICLR (International Conference on Learning Representations), 2024 & 2023, Reviewer
  • International Journal of Forecasting, Reviewer

Further Engagements

  • Expert advisor of the Berlin University Alliance (BUA) Management office, support with Data Analyses for the application for BUA prolongation to the DFG, 2024 - 2025
  • Member of the ProFiL-Program (Professionalisierung für Frauen in Forschung und Lehre: Mentoring – Training – Networking), since 2023
  • Expert of the Deutsche Klima-Konsortium e.V. (DKK), since 2020
  • Expert advisor of the Vice President for Research and Research Service Centre of the HU Berlin, 2016 - 2019
  • Volunteer support for Ukrainian refuge researchers in Berlin, since 2022
  • Advisor to several StartUps, since 2021

 

Selected conferences

  • Tagung für Wirtschaftsinformatik 2024: Activity-Based Recommendations for Demand Response in Smart Sustainable Buildings. Würzburg (with Löschmann L and Lessmann S)
  • ADBI Annual Conference 2023 Sustainable Development Goals: Midway Assessment and the Road Ahead: International Green Economy Collaboration Networks: pathway or peril for SDG 13? (with Aisbett E and Steinhauser R)
  • ICLR 2023 Tackling Climate Change with Machine Learning Workshop: Activity-Based Recommendations for the Reduction of CO2 Emissions in Private Households
  • NeurIPS 2022 Tackling Climate Change with Machine Learning Workshop: Explainable Multi-Agent Recommendation System for Energy-Efficient Decision Support in Smart Homes
  • NUS Workshop on Research Metrics (2019), National University Singapore, Singapore (SG), Is Scientific Performance a Function of Funds?
  • Singapore Economic Review Conference 2019 (SERC), Singapore (SG): Emergence of Trends in Economics
  • International Conference on Econometrics and Statistics (EcoSta 2017), Hong Kong (CN): A multivariate dynamic analysis of third-party funds

 

Selected publications

Papers in peer-reviewed journals

  • Riabchuk V, Hagel L, Germaine F  and Zharova* A (2024) Utility-Based Context-Aware Multi-Agent Recommendation System for Energy Efficiency in Residential Buildings. Information Fusion, 112, 102559. Code in GitHub. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.inffus.2024.102559
  • Zharova* A, Boer A, Knoblauch J, Schewina KI and Vihs J (2024). Explainable Multi-Agent Recommendation System for Energy-Efficient Decision Support in Smart Homes. Environmental Data Science, 2024, 3:e7. Code in GitHub. https://doi.org/10.1017/eds.2024.8
  • Zharova* A, Härdle WK, and Lessmann S (2023) Data-driven support for policy and decision-making in university research management: A case study from Germany. European Journal of Operational Research, 308(1), 353-368. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ejor.2022.10.016 Quantlets in GitHub
  • Zharova* A, Tellinger-Rice J and Härdle WK (2018) How to measure the performance of a Collaborative Research Center. Scientometrics, 117(2), 1023–1040. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-018-2910-8 Quantlets in GitHub

Papers in peer-reviewed conferences / Proceedings

  • Aisbett E, Steinhauser R, and Zharova A (2024) International Green Economy Collaboration Networks: pathway or peril for SDG 13? Asian Develoment Bank Institute Working Paper Series.
  • Zharova* A, Löschmann L, and Lessmann, S (2024) Activity-Based Recommendations for Demand Response in Smart Sustainable Buildings. Tagung für Wirtschaftsinformatik 2024 (accepted). arXiv Preprint. Code in GitHub.  https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2212.05173

Working Papers / Preprints

  • Zharova* A and Lee HE (2022) Understanding User Perception and Intention to Use Smart Home for Energy Efficiency: A Survey. arXiv Preprint. Code in GitHub. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2212.05019
  • Zharova A and Scherz A (2022) Multistep Multiappliance Load Prediction. arXiv Preprint.   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2212.09426
  • Zharova* A, Mihoci A and Härdle WK (2016). Academic ranking scales in economics: prediction and imputation, SFB 649 Discussion paper, (020)2016. Quantlets in GitHub

* - corresponding author