Team > Prof. Dr. Niklas Kühl

Faculty of Law, Business Management and Economics
Information Systems and Human-centric Artificial Intelligence

Portrait

Niklas Kühl is a Full Professor (W3) and holds the Chair of Information Systems and Human-Centric Artificial Intelligence at the University of Bayreuth. He also serves in a leadership role at the Information Systems branch of the Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Information Technology (FIT), is a Director at the FIM Research Center for Information Management, and a Senior Expert in Artificial Intelligence at IBM.

Niklas Kühl's research focuses on the intersection of artificial intelligence and its responsible application in business and society. His research program combines technical and human-centric methods in the design of sociotechnical information systems. Central themes include human-AI collaboration — in particular questions of appropriate reliance on AI recommendations, complementarity between human and machine capabilities, and the role of explainability (XAI) in decision quality. Further areas of focus include algorithmic fairness, data-centric AI, the development of robust and scalable AI products, multi-agent systems, and the application of AI in domains such as medical image analysis and sustainability transformation.

From 2020 to 2023, Niklas Kühl worked as a Managing Consultant in Data Science at IBM, where he led AI projects in the energy sector. From 2017 to 2023, he was a postdoctoral researcher at the Karlsruhe Service Research Institute (KSRI) at KIT, where he established and directed the Applied AI in Services Lab; in 2023, he completed his habilitation in Applied Computer Science. He received his doctorate in 2017 from KIT on the topic of "Needmining: Automated Analytical Support for Customer Need Elicitation," graduating summa cum laude. He previously studied Industrial Engineering, also at KIT, and gained practical experience at Porsche Business Services in Chicago, Porsche AG in Weissach, and aleo solar GmbH in Oldenburg.

Niklas Kühl maintains close collaborations with international research institutions, where he regularly conducts research visits. These include Carnegie Mellon University, the University of Warwick, the University of Auckland, the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab, the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Texas at Austin.

He has published over 200 peer-reviewed scientific papers (over 6,000 citations on Google Scholar), including articles in journals such as the European Journal of Information Systems, ACM Computing Surveys, ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction, ACM Transactions on Interactive Intelligent Systems, Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, npj Digital Medicine, International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction, Business & Information Systems Engineering, Electronic Markets, IEEE Access, and Information Systems Frontiers, as well as papers at leading conferences including ICML, CVPR, ACM CHI, ACM CSCW, ACM FAccT, ACM/AAAI AIES, AAAI, ECML/PKDD, ICIS, and ECIS. His work has received multiple Best Paper Awards.

He is a member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the Association for Information Systems (AIS), the German Data Science Society (GDS), the German Academic Association for Business Research (VHB), and the German Association of University Professors (DHV). In 2015, he founded the non-profit organization Education for Refugees e.V., which provides structured educational programs in STEM subjects for refugees, and served on its board for seven years.

Further information and updates can be found on his personal website and on LinkedIn.​

Faculty of Law, Business Management and Economics
Information Systems and Human-centric Artificial Intelligence

Publications

Faculty of Law, Business Management and Economics
Information Systems and Human-centric Artificial Intelligence

Prof. Dr. Niklas Kühl
Professor

Wittelsbacherring 10
Raum 3.25
​95444 Bayreuth

Phone: +49 921 55 4756
E-mail: kuehl@uni-bayreuth.de