Emanuel Lacić is the Operations Area Manager of the Social Computing division at the Know-Center, Austria's leading research center for data-driven business and Big Data analytics. Additionally, he is a PhD student at the Institute for Interactive Systems and Data Science (ISDS) of Graz University of Technology. He is a former Marshall Plan fellow and has been working as a visiting researcher at the Computer Science department of the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). He has a M.Sc. and B.Sc. in Software Engineering and Information Systems from the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing at the University of Zagreb. He is currently doing his PhD at Graz University of Technology in the course of the European-funded project Learning Layers on real-time recommender systems in large-scale settings. Apart from that, his research is utilized in several industry and European-funded projects such as AFEL or MoreGrasp. His main research interests are in the fields of Recommender Systems, Deep Learning, Information Retrieval, Big Data, as well as Social and Complex Network Analysis.