Ivan Habernal is Professor of Trustworthy Human Language Technologies at Ruhr University Bochum and a member of the Research Center Trustworthy Data Science and Security (RC Trust), where he leads the Trustworthy Human Language Technologies (TrustHLT) group. His work focuses on making natural language processing (NLP) systems more trustworthy–particularly by strengthening privacy protection, improving transparency, and ensuring reliable behavior in sensitive domains such as law.
His research spans privacy-preserving NLP and legal NLP, with focus on interdisciplinary perspectives. He develops methods to protect training data and prevent unintended information leakage, while also advancing AI systems that can support the analysis and understanding of legal texts. A key motivation of his work is to make complex information–such as legal knowledge – more accessible, without compromising correctness or trustworthiness.
Before joining RC Trust in April 2024, Ivan Habernal built a strong research profile across areas such as argument mining, computational argumentation, and large-scale text analysis. He is particularly interested in how AI systems interact with human values, norms, and expectations.
Beyond his academic work, Ivan Habernal has a longstanding passion for music. As a trained musician, he continues to engage with music alongside his research–an interplay that reflects both creativity and precision in his work.
