E.LACIĆ

Principal Engineer, Infobip · Zagreb, Croatia

AI Research at Infobip,building AI for global communication— and discover what comes up next.

Recommender systems·Generative AI & LLMs·Fairness & bias·Real-time personalization·Information retrieval·Evaluation & reproducibility

01 Team AI Research (AIR)about the team →

AIR is the R&D team inside Infobip — applied research on messaging, voice and customer engagement, running on a platform that carries a large share of the world's business communication.

AI is at the core of how Infobip enables communication between businesses and people at global scale. We combine applied research, industry-scale data, and production deployment to turn research insights into practical impact.

Read what AI Research is working on
The eight research areas of Team AI Research at Infobip: Human-AI Collaboration, Trustworthy AI, Conversational AI, AI-powered Communication, Fraud Detection, Spam Filtering, Voice AI, Generative Models.
Eight areas, one question: what holds up when it meets real traffic.

02 Selected workall 40 papers →

  1. 2026

    Visual Content Moderation in Messaging Systems

    Ljubičić, M., Lacić, E., Helic, D.

    WWW 2026Team AIR

    content moderationspam detectionreal timeclip

    PDFwhat it says

  2. 2022

    What Drives Readership? An Online Study on User Interface Types and Popularity Bias Mitigation in News Article Recommendations

    Lacić, E., Fadljevic, L., Weissenboeck, F., Lindstaedt, S., Kowald, D.

    ECIR 2022

    news recommendationpopularity biasuser interface

    PDFposterwhat it says

  3. 2020

    Using Autoencoders for Session-based Job Recommendations

    Lacić, E., Reiter-Haas, M., Kowald, D., Dareddy, M., Cho, J., Lex, E.

    UMUAI 2020 · journal

    job recommendationsession based recommendationautoencoders

    PDFwhat it says

  4. 2019

    Should we Embed? A Study on the Online Performance of Utilizing Embeddings for Real-Time Job Recommendations

    Lacić, E., Reiter-Haas, M., Duricic, M., Slawicek, V., Lex, E.

    RecSys 2019

    job recommendationreal timeitem embeddings

    PDFposterwhat it says

  5. 2015

    Utilizing online social network and location-based data to recommend products and categories in online marketplaces

    Lacić, E., Kowald, D., Eberhard, L., Trattner, C., Parra, D., Marinho, L. B.

    MMSM 2015 · book chapter

    online marketplacessocial datalocation based datacollaborative filtering

    PDFwhat it says

03 Talksall talks →

  • Sept 2024Is Prompting Enough? The Process of Making a Copilot for UI-based Chatbot BuildersInfobip Shift 2024 · Zadar, Croatiaslidesevent
  • Apr 2024Is Prompting Enough? The Process of Making a Copilot for UI-based Chatbot BuildersInfobip Shift Americas 2024 · Miami, USAslidesevent

04 Career in brief

  • InfobipZagreb

    2023 —
    • 2023 —Principal EngineerTeam AI Research. Focus on generative AI and the impact of LLMs.

  • Know-CenterGraz

    2016—2023
    • 2021—23Operations Area Manager, Fair-AILed the research division on applied recommender systems, fairness and social network analysis.
    • 2016—20Senior Researcher & Recommender Systems ArchitectManagement, lead development and consulting on industry recommender system projects.

See the rest on the full CV

05 Educationcv →

  • 2022PhD, Computer Sciencewith distinctionGraz University of Technology · Grazthesisdefence slides2018Visiting researcher, UCLA Computer SciencevisitingMarshall Plan Fellowship — session-based recommendation.
  • 2012M.Sc., Software Engineering & Information SystemsUniversity of Zagreb, FER · final year at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology
  • 2010B.Sc., Software Engineering & Information SystemsUniversity of Zagreb, FER · Zagreb

06 Funding & fellowshipsall →

  • 2024IPCEI-CIS€35Mproject grantNext-Generation Communication Platform · author of the AI Research Strategy for the EU programme
  • 2022–26DDIA€3.7MCOMET moduleData Driven Immersive Analytics in Digital Industries · €350k for FAIR-AI, Know-Center · key researcher for “Personalized Immersive Learning Support”
  • 2022–25Radreisen4All€150,000project grantFFG Femtech · for Fair-AI, Know-Center · key researcher
  • 2020–23DDAI€3.7MCOMET moduleExplainable, Verifiable and Privacy-Preserving Data-Driven AI · €700k for Social Computing, Know-Center · key researcher for “Explainable AI for Users”
  • 2020JOLIOO€120,000project grantFFG Basisantrag · for Social Computing, Know-Center · researcher
  • 2020–23COGSTEPS€130,000project grantErasmus+ · for Know-Center and ISDS@TU Graz · researcher
  • 2020–22TRUSTS€730,000project grantH2020 · for Know-Center (€138k for Social Computing) · task leader
  • 2019–22TRIPLE€377,000project grantH2020 · for Know-Center (€120k for Social Computing) · researcher
  • 2018Marshall Plan FellowshipfellowshipIndividual research grant for a visiting stay at UCLA, Los Angeles
  • 2015Data Market Austria€286,000project grantIKT der Zukunft · secured for Know-Center as technology contributor for the recommender-based brokerage platform

07 Collaborate

Working on something adjacent?

Joint agendas, pilots, student theses, or a paper that needs an industrial testbed — those are the conversations worth having.

Get in touch

emanuel [dot] lacic [at] infobip [dot] com · or find me on LinkedIn