About

I am a Ph.D. student at the DEEM Lab at BIFOLD & TU Berlin, supervised by Prof. Dr.-Ing. Sebastian Schelter (TU Berlin) and Prof. Dr. Maarten de Rijke (University of Amsterdam).

My research focuses on Machine Unlearning for Recommender Systems, developing methods that allow recommendation models to efficiently forget specific training data, with applications to privacy (e.g., the right to be forgotten) and removal of malicious content.

Prior to my PhD, I completed a Master’s degree in Computer Science at Freie Universität Berlin and worked as a student assistant at the Fraunhofer Heinrich Hertz Institute (HHI), where I wrote my master’s thesis on Neural Network Post-Filters for Video Coding.

Publications

ERASE – A Real-World Aligned Benchmark for Unlearning in Recommender Systems

Pierre Lubitzsch, Maarten de Rijke, Sebastian Schelter. (2026). "ERASE -- A Real-World Aligned Benchmark for Unlearning in Recommender Systems." Preprint

Towards a Real-World Aligned Benchmark for Unlearning in Recommender Systems

Pierre Lubitzsch, Olga Ovcharenko, Hao Chen, Maarten de Rijke, Sebastian Schelter. (2025). "Towards a Real-World Aligned Benchmark for Unlearning in Recommender Systems." FAccTRec@RecSys 2025

Research Interests

• Machine Unlearning
• Recommender Systems
• Generative IR/Rec

CV

Education

• Ph.D. in Computer Science, Technische Universität Berlin / BIFOLD, 2025 – present
  • Supervisors: Prof. Dr.-Ing. Sebastian Schelter (TU Berlin) and Prof. Dr. Maarten de Rijke (UvA)
  • Topic: Machine Unlearning for Recommender Systems
• M.Sc. in Computer Science, Freie Universität Berlin, 2021 – 2024
  • Thesis: Neural Network Post-Filters for Video Coding (in cooperation with Fraunhofer HHI)
• B.Sc. in Computer Science (grade 1.4), Freie Universität Berlin, 2018 – 2021
• Abitur (grade 1.7), Werner-von-Siemens-Gymnasium Berlin, 2012 – 2018
  • Advanced courses: Computer Science, Mathematics

Work Experience

• Feb 2025 – present: PhD Student
  • BIFOLD – Berlin Institute for the Foundations of Learning and Data / TU Berlin, Berlin, Germany
  • Research on Machine Unlearning for Recommender Systems
  • Supervisors: Sebastian Schelter and Maarten de Rijke
• Dec 2022 – Dec 2024: Student Assistant
  • Fraunhofer Heinrich Hertz Institute (HHI), Berlin, Germany
  • Work on neural network coding for video compression
  • Wrote master’s thesis: Neural Network Post-Filters for Video Coding
• Aug 2020 – Oct 2020: Web Development Intern
  • writeaguide, Berlin, Germany
  • Fullstack web development internship

Skills

• Machine Learning & Deep Learning
• Recommender Systems & Machine Unlearning
• Video Coding & Neural Network Post-Processing
• Programming: Python, C, C++
• Web Development: HTML, CSS, JavaScript (Fullstack)

Languages

• German (Native)
• English (Professional working proficiency)
• Spanish (Limited working proficiency)