I am a researcher in AI/ML working on problems related to information understanding and analysis across news, social media, and clinical data.

Research Interests

Information diffusion in news and social media
Multimodal news analysis (text, images)
LLM-based multi-agent systems and ecosystems
Clinical data analysis and healthcare AI
Plagiarism detection and content similarity modeling

Affiliations

Jozef Stefan Institute
Associate Researcher
2024 – Present · Ljubljana · Slovenia

Univerza v Mariboru
Associate Researcher
2025 – 2026 · Maribor · Slovenia

Marie Skłodowska-Curie Innovative Training Network
Early Stage researcher (ESR)
2020 – 2023

Jozef Stefan Institute
PhD
2020 – 2024 · Ljubljana · Slovenia

The British Library
ESR
Jul-Sept 2022 · London · UK

UK Web Archive
ESR
May-Jul 2021 · London · UK

PMAS Arid Agriculture University
Lecturer
2018 – 2020 · Gujrat · Pakistan

Nextbridge
Senior Software Engineer
2013 – 2018 · Lahore · Pakistan

Research Projects

PREPARE
Associate Researcher
2026 – Present · Ljubljana · Slovenia

TWON
Associate Researcher
2024 – 2026 · Ljubljana · Slovenia

AI4Hope
Associate Researcher
2025 – 2026 · Maribor · Slovenia

CLEOPATRA
PhD
2020 – 2023 · Ljubljana · Slovenia

Top publications

(2026) Fake News Detection Through LLM-Driven Text Augmentation Across Media and Languages at Machine Learning and Knowledge Extraction (Q1)
(2026) Constructing a dataset to support agent-based modeling of online interactions: users, topics, and interaction networks at IEEE access (Q1)
(2025) BAR-analytics: A web-based platform for analyzing information spreading barriers in news: Comparative analysis across multiple barriers and events at International Journal of Information Management Data Insights (Q1)
(2025) News dissemination: a semantic approach to barrier classification at Journal of Intelligent Information Systems (Q2)
(2025) Analysis of Event-Centric News Spreading Barriers at Springer Nature
(2023) Profiling the barriers to the spreading of news using news headlines at Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence (Q2)
(2022) MM-claims: a dataset for multimodal claim detection in social media at NAACL (Top-tier)
(2022) Political and Economic Patterns in COVID-19 News: From Lockdown to Vaccination at IEEE Access (Q1)
(2022) Analysis of information cascading and propagation barriers across distinctive news events at Journal of Intelligent Information Systems (Q2)
(2016) Author Diarization Using Cluster-Distance Approach at CLEF (Working Notes)
(2021) Classification of Cross-cultural News Events
(2020) A Dataset for Information Spreading over the News
(2018) Multi-lingual Author Profiling using Stylistic Features

Conference & Workshop Publications

(2026) Nudging Civility on Online Social Networks with Large Language Models
F. t’Serstevens, C. Oschatz, A. Sittar, D. Trilling, A. Guček
(2025) Designing AI Agents for Social Media
A. Sittar, M. Smiljanić, A. Guček
(2024) Perception of AI in Slovenia
A. Sittar, A. Guček, D. Mladenić
(2024) Fact Manipulation in News: LLM-Driven Synthesis and Evaluation of Fake News Annotation
L. Golob, A. Sittar
(2022) Stylistic Features in Clustering News Reporting: News Articles on Brexit
Proceedings of the 23rd International Multiconference Information Society
(2021) Using the Profile of Publishers to Predict Barriers Across News Articles
Proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on Cross-lingual Event-centric Open Analytics
(2021) How are the Economic Conditions and Political Alignment of a Newspaper Reflected in the Events They Report On?
Central European Conference on Information and Intelligent Systems (CECIIS)
(2021) Classification of Cross-cultural News Events
Proceedings of the 24th International Multiconference Information Society
(2020) A Dataset for Information Spreading over the News
Proceedings of the 23rd International Multiconference Information Society
(2018) Multi-lingual Author Profiling using Stylistic Features
FIRE 2018
(2016) Author Diarization Using Cluster-Distance Approach
CLEF 2016 Working Notes
(2015) A Corpus for Analyzing Text Reuse by People of Different Groups
CLEF 2015 Working Notes
(2015) Identification of Author Personality Traits Using Stylistic Features
CLEF 2015
(2015) Identification of Author Personality Traits Using Stylistic Features: Notebook for PAN at CLEF 2015
CLEF 2015 Working Notes