Maria Heuss

I am an Assistant Professor at the Information Retrieval Lab (IRLab) of the University of Amsterdam (UvA). My research focuses on responsible advice-giving systems.

During my PhD at the UvA, I did research on fairness and interpretability in information retrieval under the supervision of Maarten de Rijke and Avishek Anand at the IRLab. My PhD was funded by the Hybrid Intelligence Center.

My BSc and MSc are both in (pure) mathematics from University of Freiburg in Germany.

News

• [Jan 2026] I am hiring! We will have a PhD position available at the UvA on responsible advice-giving systems. (Link + details on this in January)
• [Jan 2026] I have started my position as assistant professor at the IRLab, UvA
• [Dec 2025] Our tutorial on mechanistic interpretability in IR was accepted to ECIR 2026
• [Dec 2025] Our paper “How Do LLMs Cite? A Mechanistic Interpretation of Attribution in RAG” has been accepted to the IR-for-Good track at ECIR 2026.
• [Oct 2025] I’ve successfully defended my PhD thesis, entitled “Responsible Advice Giving Systems - Fairness and Interpretability in Information Retrieval”.
• [July 2025] Our workshop on explainable information retrieval (WExIR) at SIGIR 2025 has been a full success.
• [July 2025] I have presented our paper “RankingSHAP – Listwise Feature Attribution Explanations for Ranking Models” at SIGIR 2025
• [June 2025] Our paper “Correctness is not Faithfulness in Retrieval Augmented Generation Attributions” has been accepted to ICTIR 2025.